Zamboanga City records new Covid-19 case

By Teofilo Garcia, Jr. and Salvador Santiago  

May 23, 2020

ZAMBOANGA CITY – A barangay front-liner was tested positive for coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), bringing to a total of 142 Covid-19 cases here.

Mayor Maria Isabelle Climaco-Salazar, chairperson of the local Inter-Agency Task Force on Covid-19, said Saturday the new additional case is a 34-year-old female and forms part of the 44 people from Barangay Zone I earlier subjected to a random rapid diagnostic test.

Salazar said the result of the latest geneexpert test by the ZCMC on the patient was released late Friday.

Salazar said the patient, a barangay worker, is asymptomatic and has been transferred to the government isolation facility in Barangay Cabatangan.

The mayor said that contact tracing is ongoing to determine who came into close contact with the female patient.

Meanwhile, the residents of Barangay Mercedes are apprehensive after they learned that the latest positive case is a resident of a resettlement site in their village.

Mercedes Barangay chairperson Arthur Alejandro said the patient is a health worker of Barangay Zone II although she is a resident of the village.

Barangay Zone II Barangay chairperson Nonito Aranas confirmed the patient is a worker at the health center in his village, which also caters to residents of Barangay Zone I.

Aranas said the health worker had even conducted immunization drive in Barangay Zone I after she had undergone a rapid test together with 43 other persons.

Alejandro said the resettlement area where she lives has been placed on lockdown to pave the way for the contact tracing.

Alejandro appealed to the neighbors of the patient to refrain from discriminating against her family.

“We should extend our help in this time of crisis,” he added. (PNA)

P16.4-B subsidies released to 2.1M small business workers

 May 17, 2020

MANILA – The first tranche of a two-month wage subsidy package has been credited to the accounts of more than 2.1 million qualified beneficiary-workers of the Small Business Wage Subsidy (SBWS) program, jointly implemented by the Department of Finance (DOF), Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), and the Social Security System (SSS).

The SBWS was designed to support qualified workers who were not able to receive their salaries for at least two weeks due to the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) and other containment measures imposed by the national and local governments since middle of March to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19).

A total of about PHP16.4 billion worth of subsidies were credited to the accounts of SBWS beneficiaries as of May 12, equivalent to PHP5,000 to PHP8,000 per qualified worker, depending on the minimum wage level in his or her region. 

SBWS subsidies are either credited to the beneficiaries' bank or PayMaya accounts or sent through cash remittance via MLhuillier financial services.

This SBWS initiative is one of the intervention programs that the Duterte administration has rolled out in support of low-income families, workers of small businesses, and other vulnerable sectors that are hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic's economic fallout. 

The SBWS interagency task force is chaired by the DOF, represented by Assistant Secretary Antonio Joselito Lambino II, and with SSS President-CEO Aurora Ignacio and BIR Deputy Commissioner Arnel Guballa as members.

Lambino said MLhuillier Kwarta Padala, through the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP), is the partner-remittance center of the SSS in the disbursement of wage subsidies to unbanked beneficiaries. 

The task force decided to tap the DBP because of its experience in delivering subsidies via money remittance to beneficiaries of the Department of Agriculture’s Rice Farmers Financial Assistance (RFFA) program, many of whom do not have bank accounts.

Meanwhile, Ignacio said “almost 160,000 employers submitted applications for the program as the applications ended on May 8, 2020."

"The SSS is currently processing them, but so far, the applications for around 2.94 million employees have been approved according to program criteria. This represents around 86 percent of the program’s target of 3.4 million small business employees," she said.

  

Payouts for the first tranche of the SBWS subsidies began on April 30, one day ahead of the announced May 1 to 15 schedule of release. 

Payouts for the second tranche are scheduled for May 16 to 31. (PR)