Soft announcement of extension

The President and his people went on air Monday primarily for the chief executive to bury the hatchet with two conglomerates that have gone the extra mile to help defuse social tensions. This newly-friendly attitude has been carried over to media, where the Solicitor General’s barking at the NTC not to temporarily permit ABS-CBN to keep functioning past its formal franchise expiration was nullified by the Secretary of Justice making soothing noises to the effect that allowing the status quo to continue is OK. Yet, late yesterday, the NTC sent a cease-and-desist order to ABS-CBN. Still, this is not a time for the President (or his people) to be picking fights. The IATF had to close the country to incoming foreign flights to stem the arrival of OFWs who’ve lost work (a staggering 20,000 were in quarantine the other day, if reports are to be believed). The President had to repeat his appeal for LGUs to stop treating returning OFWs like lepers.

“Deputy Implementer Dizon” (as one summary put it; don’t you love how we create titles for every official?) made encouraging noises about expanding testing, while pointing to Germany (high numbers of tests) and New Zealand as model nations (moved quickly and tested widely). Secretary Galvez, for his part, said additional testing labs will be set up in Mindanao. Bill Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, suggests this benchmark to assess if enough testing is taking place: If 10 percent or even lower of tests are coming in positive, you’re probably doing enough testing.

At present, per DOH data on the Tableau public dashboard of data scientist Cherry Ronao, we’re at an 8.1-percent positivity rate as of May 3, 2020. Dr. Benjamin Co, in an online article on April 30, said at first blush we are bending the curve, because the COVID-19 growth rate has declined to 2.8 percent; but then he also pointed out that assumes near real-time reporting, which is not the case. Dr. Minguita Padilla a few days later pointed out there was an 8,000-strong backlog in testing; a while earlier, another reported a backlog of over 100,000. What both these observations point to is that there is a time lag between announced figures and when they were taken; we are not being told numbers in real time (nor are government policy makers receiving data in real time).

Returning to Co, his point seems to be that reporting COVID-19 deaths is neither timely nor fully accurate, and if one looks at the (far from perfectly reported) numbers, they have remained fairly steady, which does not suggest a bending of the curve. He further warns that the rainy season brings with it other, serious, challenges to our already beleaguered health system.

Returning to Dizon, he was quoted as saying the “challenge now is how do we ramp up our testing where we can be comfortable to start easing the restrictions,” adding government’s goal was to build or accredit 58 more labs by the end of May.

To my mind, this new era of good feelings, plus Dizon’s saying government still has to get to the point it’s comfortable lifting restrictions, subtly suggests a lockdown until June and modified quarantine thereafter, stretching late into the year and even to the next, until a vaccine can be found and/or some sort of “herd immunity” happens. Joey Concepcion recently made a statement in which he (perhaps foolishly) said he was confident the lockdown will be lifted by May 15; he also seemed to be saying that big companies are importing testing kits and will screen/clear their workers, and then arrange to provide barracks housing near factories. This ties in with the announced schedule (September for full factory operations), while freeing government of a task it can’t do, which is mass testing. The private sector will just screen itself and go back to work while government subsidizes everyone else.

In the meantime, government must eke out income where it can, while respecting the remaining sources of income for the middle and upper classes — hence lovingly embracing Pogos even if Beijing won’t like this. It can make tactical adjustments to its strong-arm methods, embracing the Zobels and Pangilinan while backing off from its original hard-line house arrest proclamation concerning the Baby Boomers (the generation that brought us the First Quarter Storm and Edsa, in case anyone’s forgotten).

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