The Severest Disaster To Hit In Years

BIMBO CABIDOG

Last March 16, 2020 the government placed the country under various types of lockdown in response to COVID 19. Five months later, the nation is churning in the severest disaster to hit in years, its leaders’ own making. 

As a result of the measure to arrest the pandemic, “martial-law style” (according to some excited police generals), businesses closed sending millions of folks out of job. Markets stumbled due to curtailed consumption with people either stripped of purchasing power or confined to their homes. Livelihoods slid into bankruptcy. The economy nose-dived.

But by August, in the biggest spike of COVID infections over a single day, the country registered 6,352 new positive cases easily upping those infected by the virus to 112,593. This would spiral in a couple of days when the Philippines chalked the highest in the pandemic tally throughout Southeast Asia or the West Pacific, dislodging Indonesia with a population of more than 200 million at the top spot. The numbers now near the 200,000 mark.

Confronted by the outcome, the national government is singing a different tune: it has to lift the community quarantines. Ironically this, after the infected have risen exponentially from a few hundreds at the start of the CQs in March to more than a hundred and fifty thousand after four months of the longest and strictest lockdown in the world.

It seems that the virus already comes second of the people’s worries. The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported that the economy fell by 16.5 percent over the second quarter, the steepest since 1983 during the Marcos dictatorship when it fell by 10.7 percent. The contraction meant the country has hit the grave condition called recession, a general decline in trade and industry marked by negative growths of the gross domestic product over two consecutive quarters.

According to acting Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua, the lockdown grounded three fourths of the nation’s economic activities. The very first to be hit were the airlines, which cancelled flights right at the start of the quarantines and went on indefinite holiday for the next three months. The ensuing land, sea and air transport stoppages paralyzed social and economic mobility.

With commerce and industry virtually at a standstill, unemployment rate rose to 17.4 percent, the highest in 15 years. By April, according to the PSA, 7.3 million Filipinos were jobless. The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) noted that since January, already 1.9 million workers went out of job due to closures, while “flexible work arrangements,” like forced leave and reduced workdays, displaced 1.1 million. As the pandemic lashed and quarantines enveloped the country in gloom, millions more of workers including returning OFWs ejected from work abroad would park without means of earning.

Towards August, nearly 7,000 business establishments across the country told DOLE they were either laying-off workers or shutting down for good. The closures would further displace 141,958 workers. The mindless denial by the government of the ABS-CBN franchise renewal in July, which poised to axe 11,000 workers at the end of August, exacerbated the dire situation. Unemployment at present has risen to a record high of 45.5 percent or 27.7 million jobless.

The grounding of economic activity by the ill-conceived lockdowns cost the country around PhP1.5 trillion a month. The Gross Domestic Product shrank to PhP8.6 trillion during the April-June period this year from PhP9.3 trillion of the same quarter last year, National Statistician Claire Dennis Mapa said.

The steep decline in the second quarter GDP would be the biggest since 1981, and the fastest drop year-on-year since World War II. Overall, the current team of the government’s economic managers anticipates a contraction of the economy at 5.5 percent for the whole of 2020. Unavoidable at this point, the downturn is unprecedented. 

It was not as if his administration evaded being one major casualty itself. President Duterte, in his nocturnal addresses to the nation, would complain that the public coffers are almost dried up. Market downtrends cut down tax collection over the period of the community quarantines, making the government dependent on trillions of loans for continued operation. An unequivocal admission that it is already in the red is Duterte’s constant harping of the line, “I have no more money.”

Despite the imposition of virtual police-military rule with its punishing restrictions or protocols on the populace, COVID 19 merely intensified and there’s hardly any sign now of it abating. But the accompanying reality to this would prove even worse: a more deadly toll of great masses of the people with no means of living, staring into an abyss of social and economic uncertainty, and on the threshold of hunger if not yet there. It is not likely that all these are just going to vanish in the months or even years ahead.

The government’s handling or fumbling of the health challenge certainly generated a highly disastrous backlash. But the most catastrophic outcome on the lives of Filipinos may yet be to come, even as the pandemic continues to devastate their country. Do they at the helm who have been directing all the responses to it comprehend the magnitude of those responses’ cataclysmic consequences?  Or are they even ready to comprehend such?

The heads of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-MEID) who call the shots on the crisis definitely bungled. Now, what? Instead of buckling down to correct mistakes, restrategize and yet save the nation, they bend towards gas lighting to save face. They either heap the blame on the citizenry for being allegedly undisciplined and "pasaway," or peddle falsities to deflect attention from the main concern: that the country has risen to become No. 1 in COVID cases in the region, despite the militarist controls on the populace to curb it leading to the worst economic debacle on record.

What the country’s present ordeal will turn out is hard to see. No matter how the authorities drum up optimism on getting over it in the immediate future, any clear end to the raging COVID 19 pandemic is nowhere in sight. Only one thing is certain, that whatever is up ahead remains bleak and unpredictable. If results until now are the gauge, the country yet stands to lose the fight against the disease.

Unseen and by and large just imagined, the dreaded virus has presented something of an enigma, easy to cite but hard to fathom. It has struck in the fashion of what prayerful Catholics oft mention as the sorrowful mystery. The plague would not only inflect sickness and death by the thousands, but foist unprecedented suffering to millions of people who have lost their wherewithal to live.

For an organism, invisible to the naked eye, to imperil man purportedly with the highest intelligence of all life forms, overpower him whose might has remade the world after his image and likeness, wreak havoc on society, and humble the proudest knowledge in the wake of its fury, is beyond thought. In the final analysis, no science may really know this COVID 19.