Nordcham Hosts Webinar on the Current COVID-19 Crisis and Outlook
By Alina M. Manaig
Striking a balance between health and economy is what our country has to think about when it finally decides to lift the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ). I understand that health should be the top priority, but up to what extent? What if there are no more employees left to work since everyone is still scared to go out and commute to their offices? Then how will the company survive? I know we are now living in a VUCA (vulnerable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world, but I guess this is the new normal. A normal that we need to adapt to, and quickly.
This was my major takeaway from the Nordcham webinar I attended last April 16 with featured speaker Erika Fille Legara, Ph.D., Aboitiz Chair of Data Science at the Asian Institute of Management. She started off her talk by comparing the different viruses and pandemics that have affected the world and she said that based on studies, it was the 1918 Spanish Flu that was most comparable to COVID-19. Being a data scientist, Dr. Legara looks at how viruses have evolved, studies the series of pandemics since the Black Death (also known as the plague) and pinpoints the most fatal of all pandemics recorded in human history. She summed it up by saying, “Pandemics are bound to happen — we can expect more pandemics to happen and with more frequency.”
Zeroing in on COVID-19, it has impacted the world economy with a forecast of 25 million jobs that will be lost globally, an estimated 32.7% unemployment rate in the US (worse than the Great Depression, which was at 25%), and a workers’ income loss of $3.4 trillion by the end of 2020, according to the ILO. In the Philippines, Dr. Legara, together with her colleague Dr. Christopher Monterola, wrote a piece for Rappler published last March 17 that analyzed if the random spread of the virus could not be contained, the numbers of positive cases could reach 26,000 by the end of March. Good thing our government implemented the ECQ and our confirmed cases are still relatively low compared to other countries.
As data scientists, they would like to make projections for the country in terms of when we can flatten the curve like other countries. South Korea reached its peak in 2 weeks’ time and flattened the curve in a month’s time, while China reached its peak in 27 days and flattened the curve in 54 days. These countries were able to project and forecast. Unfortunately for the Philippines, we still do not know when we will reach our peak. Different organizations and groups have given different numbers as to when we will reach our peak — some say in April, while others say as far as September 2020. And in terms of numbers, it ranges from a low of 140K to a high of 29M infections. So what can one conclude from these varying forecasts? The data is insignificant as we have not done any mass testing yet, as of this writing. Singapore and Korea are already talking about the incidence of re-infection while our country is still figuring out when we will reach our peak.
So how do we move forward with this? Unless we do mass testing, we will not be able to forecast. We will not be able to say it is safe to go out and return to things as they were. As an individual and an organization, we should think of strategizing and planning in much greater detail as this new normal will definitely take longer. We should be ready for the long haul. Are you?
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About the author:
Alina has over 25 years of professional experience in executive management consultancy, talent search and recruitment operations, and sales and marketing. Alina is mother to three beautiful children and a wife to a wonderful husband. Aside from her love for coffee, she also loves shopping with her older sister. Alina spends her free time traveling, playing badminton, and watching movies.
