"Silver linings can still be found."
What a difference a week can make.
Last Tuesday I wrote about how “online half-truths and manufactured fears” were exacerbating the “fear factor” as a major reason for the epidemic’s negative effects on our economic prospects. At that time, there had been only a few recorded cases of infection and just two deaths, both of them foreign travelers.
Today, the number of confirmed infections exceeds a hundred, with many others classed as possible carriers. The President has put Metro Manila under a lockdown euphemistically labelled a “community quarantine,” but all 17 mayors here want to go even farther and declare a curfew. Overburdened health workers are pleading for more equipment; to their credit, private citizens have been mobilizing, but government still has to deliver what ought to be its disproportionate share.
The death toll has reached a dozen, its tentacles touching the unsuspecting. It became personal for me when I learned that the second local fatality was a friend of my wife’s and mine from college days at UP, whose husband we had known just as long. We were together in many places—in Washington DC, in Jakarta, of course in Manila—over the decades. Their children are Stateside and could not be beside them in their hour of need, and it’s for that—and for the kids—that I grieve the most.
Yes, the bogeyman is real, and he’s here. Even our churches have closed down in his presence. But now that we can no longer gather together as faith communities, it’s also precisely the time when we ought to be reasserting our religious loyalties by praying and caring more for each other, especially those who may be sick or—like our health workers—in need of our support. The more we encounter each other through acts of charity that go beyond the boundaries of “social distancing,” the more we prevent the bogeyman from imprisoning us more effectively than any virus could.
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The virus has already affected our economic prospects, as I also wrote last week. But silver linings can still be found. According to NEDA’s Secretary Pernia, even with the epidemic, our country can still grow its per capita gross national income (GNI) by 3-4 percent this year. And that, thankfully, should bring us above the magic number of $3,956–the lower limit above which, according to the World Bank, a country can claim to be “upper middle income” in status.
Of course, silver linings come with clouds. Once we reach that status, we’ll no longer be entitled to the preferentially low borrowing rates made available to lower-income countries by multilateral lenders. So we’ll have to work harder to upgrade our credit rating to single-A within the next two to three years. This will serve to bring back down our borrowing costs and make it easier to finance all the new stuff we now know we need to spend for, i.e. better health care systems including reserve resources; a stand-by medical corps; wider safety nets for our congested urban poor communities (to borrow a few ideas from a Bill Gates TED talk way back in 2015).
Abroad, the oil price war that’s broken out between Saudi Arabia and Russia as they battle for global market share will happily bring down local pump prices and keep our inflation outlook benign. Unfortunately, it may also bring job losses for our overseas workers as their host countries in the Middle East absorb the impact of lower prices on their most important export commodity.
This mixed picture calls for a steady monetary policy, not further easing and lowering of interest rates, according to former BSP deputy governor Diwa Guinigundo. Even as the Fed contemplates zero interest rates in the United States, we need not follow them heedlessly. As Diwa puts it quite perceptively, “There is virtue in waiting. There is virtue in patience especially when information is very little and there’s a lot of uncertainty in the market.”
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Today’s first reading from the Old Testament is particularly apropos as we deal with the heat of the virus epidemic.
In Daniel 3: 34-43, three young Jewish men—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—are thrown into a furnace by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in his rage over their refusal to worship him. The “white-hot furnace” is super-heated with brimstone, pitch, tow and wood to a height of over 70 feet and a temperature seven times hotter than usual, enough to burn the soldiers who threw the three Jewish men into it.
But an angel comes down into their midst, driving the flames out of the furnace, and protects them from being burned, even as the three men sing their prayer to the Lord: “Let our sacrifice be in your presence today as we follow you unreservedly…We follow you with our whole heart, we fear you and we pray to you. Do not let us be put to shame, but deal with us in your kindness and great mercy. Deliver us by your wonders, and bring glory to your name, O Lord!”
A furnace and an epidemic are different forms of a holocaust, a term which is ultimately sacrificial in meaning: an offering to God. Whatever pain and inconvenience we may undergo from this viral trial may also be sacrificially offered up by us. And whatever charity we learn from it, and do unto each other, turns us away from the bogeyman and brings us that much closer to the Divine Presence.
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