May 28, 2021 — The Philippines could have saved up to 3.6 percentage points in lost Gross Domestic Product forecasted in 2020 equivalent to about P700 billion if we had listened to our own experts, that we had to be better prepared for emerging outbreaks.
This was the assertion of economist and UP professor Toby Melissa C. Monsod at the Stop COVID Deaths Webinar #47 that looked into the scenarios in the next 12 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Monsod cited the evidence found in studies that the traditional channels of government spending to increase output and stabilize the economy were overshadowed by the importance of having specific core capacities precisely to detect and decisively respond to this pandemic.
“If COVID-19 is not well contained [first], then government spending aimed at other things may not matter for economic recovery and could even make things worse. The implication is clear: health system capacity must be prioritized over and above other types of spending, including the ‘Build, build, build’ project,” she stated.
Monsod decried that the 2021 budget does not quite reflect this necessity. “The 2021 budget decreases the budget of DOH and other related items by about 25% and increases allocations to the Department of Public Works and Highways for infrastructure spending.”
She lamented that the country is back to the relief stage without a recovery budget, much less relief budget which is the challenge today. “We need to convince officials and stakeholders who are concerned for the economy and for economic recovery to focus on capacitating public health systems so that we can get out of this hole.”
According to Monsod, this is a big task because the government is not accustomed to thinking that way. It would help to identify more precisely what capacities to invest in as a matter of priority, in what sequence and where at what level of the public health system – national, provincial, city, or municipal.
Monsod explained that a one-size-fits-all solution does not make sense given budget and time constraints. “Clearly, the crisis has proceeded at different speeds and intensities across the archipelago and so it may not make economic sense for all regions or cities to invest in the same capacities at the same time, in the same sequence everywhere,” she intoned.
She expressed frustration at how the government wasted the country’s strong economic fundamentals at the onset of the COVID crisis. Monsod countered the blame put by our economic managers on the strict lockdown because “the lockdown precisely suspended economic activity, restricted mobility of people in order to hold the pandemic at bay and buy time for the health system to organize itself.”
Rather than blame the lockdown which she said was the longest and most stringent in the ASEAN Plus 3 region, she asserted that “the different capacities to detect and respond to the COVID-19 outbreak accounted significantly for the different economic outcomes among countries in the region.”
“Implementing a cross-country model, we found that stronger national capacities to detect and respond to emerging outbreaks are associated with better short-term economic outcomes for the Philippines; better prepared laboratory systems,” Monsod declared.
Pandemic alternative futures
Another lecturer in the same webinar, Mr. John Wong, epidemiologist and professor at the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health, urged listeners to look at the pandemic as a system for a better and holistic understanding of where we are now and where we are headed.
Presenting a diagram of the system, he explained how the susceptibles can become exposed so that if we want to reduce their number, we have to reduce exposure to reduce transmission, as these are things we can control. This, he said will also lead to a higher recovery rate and lower death rate as the more active cases we have, the more susceptible people can be exposed. Prof. Wong mentioned immunization being done now as the silver lining to drain the susceptibles. The more people who can be immunized, the fewer who will become exposed, he argued.
To reduce the transmission rate, he suggested improving compliance with the minimum public health standards. DOH recently released guidelines for improving ventilation in workplaces, avoiding mass gatherings, and active case finding and community mass testing.
He urged bringing the laboratories to the communities with a lot of cases as it’s difficult to do contact tracing at this scale of the pandemic. “We have to prepare that capacity so that when the cases go down, we’re able to do it better and prevent another surge. We have to be able to measure now how efficient we are in isolation and quarantine.”
Cynthia M. Villamor | Published in UP Manila Healthscape Special COVID-19 Issue No. 27
