BusinessMirror March 22, 2020

ROTARY CLUB OF MANILA JOURNALISM AWARDS

2006 National Newspaper of the Year 2011 National Newspaper of the Year 2013 Business Newspaper of the Year 2017 Business Newspaper of the Year 2019 Business Newspaper of the Year

BusinessMirror

www.businessmirror.com.ph

A broader look at today’s business n

Sunday, March 22, 2020 Vol. 15 No. 164

EJAP JOURNALISM AWARDS

BUSINESS NEWS SOURCE OF THE YEAR (2017, 2018)

DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

2018 BANTOG MEDIA AWARDS

PHILIPPINE STATISTICS AUTHORITY

DATA CHAMPION

P25.00 nationwide | 8 pages | 7 DAYS A WEEK

TRAFFIC is light on the South Luzon Expressway, which connects Metro Manila to the provinces of the Calabarzon region, after the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine, March 18, 2020. NONIE REYES

PANDEMIC, LOCKDOWN PROMPT STAKEHOLDERS TO ADJUST, FORWARD PROPOSALS VS IMPACT

STAYING ALIVE

By Jovee Marie N. Dela Cruz, Bernadette D. Nicolas & Elijah Felice Rosales

R

EP. Joey S. Salceda is becoming an oracle these days. And thank heavens that Salceda, chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, does not speak in dactylic hexameter.

Salceda has warned that inaction on addressing the savagery wrought on the Philippine economy by the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) is a perilous option.

“The possible overall impact of Covid-19, if we don’t implement action, is 1.2 percent of GDP [gross domestic product] lower than our baseline growth or just 5.3 percent to 5.8 percent full-year growth this year,” Salceda said in his aide memoire addressed to the leadership of the House of Representatives.

That is an insight shared by Insurance Commissioner Dennis B. Funa.

“All industries will be affected with no exception. And I foresee the impact of this pandemic running through up the end of the year,” Funa told the BusinessMirror in an interview.

“Virus is a threat that will hurt the Philippine economy,” he added.

Indeed, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has prompted the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) to paint a bleak forecast on the country’s relations with the world.

The Unctad’s assessment in March showed the Philippines could lose as much as $300 million worth of exports due to the Covid-19 out-

break worldwide. Most of the damage could come from the shipments of communication equipment estimated to decline by $115 million.

Further, shipment of office machinery is seen to slide by $76.8 million, while that of electrical machinery is anticipated to decrease by $41.8 million. The Unctad also said Philippine exports of auto parts and various machinery will go down by $22 million and $16.9 million, respectively.

Signs of illness

IT did not show much in the January data of exports and imports; in fact, trade improved in the first month of the year. But there were, as they call it, symptoms.

According to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), exports in January grew 9.67 percent to $5.78 billion, from $5.27 billion during the same month last year. Shipments of electronic parts, the country’s top export item, rose nearly 16 percent to $3.23 billion, from $2.79 billion.

Also, exports to coronavirusaffected economies Hong Kong and China went up by 25.5 percent and 6.98 percent, respectively. In spite of this, PSA data showed there is some tension building up on certain products that were later on declared to be

PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 51.2150

FRUIT vendors cross an almost-empty Epifanio delos Santos Highway as enhanced community quarantine is implemented to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus in Manila, March 19, 2020. AP/AARON FAVILA

hardest struck by the pandemic.

In January, shipments of telecommunication units slipped 1.21 percent to $37.25 million, from $37.71 million during the same month last year. Likewise, exports of communication and radar dropped over 24 percent to $55.57 million, from $73.58 million.

Positive light

THE Philippines is the least to take export losses from the pandemic among Southeast Asian nations, according to the Unctad report. In the region, Vietnam is expected to absorb the heaviest damage in terms of exports, by $2.29 billion, followed by Singapore ($2.16 billion), Malaysia ($1.07 billion),

Thailand ($733 million) and Indonesia ($311.7 million).

Trade Secretary Ramon M. Lopez takes this in a positive light.

Lopez argued the impact is modest, and it can be offset by the seemingly inevitable transfer of some manufacturers from China to Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines.

“One important direction that companies would be focusing on would be the diversification of their supply chain,” Lopez told the BusinessMirror. “As this is happening, opportunities are also emerging, as local and foreign companies now look at the Philippines as an important viable alternative location.”

Still, the economy has yet to

see the actual impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the manufacturing output and exports of the Philippines, especially with the placing of the entire Luzon under the enhanced community quarantine of the government. Under such policy, movement of people— the horsepower of export zones— is restricted.

Impact on insurers

TO cushion the impact of the spread of Covid-19 especially to insurers, the IC earlier last week also released a circular letter addressed to all insurance and reinsurance companies, mutual benefit associations, health maintenance organizations and other concerned persons, to adopt and

implement claims management policies relative to the processing and/or payment of Covid-19-related claims to relax or streamline existing company procedures to facilitate immediate processing and or payment of Covid-19 related claims.

Further, the notice of claim period and the period for completion of claim requirements must also be relaxed and services that will improve overall customer claims experience must also be enhanced, IC said.

“Whereas, given the gravity of Covid-19 coronavirus situation and to inspire consumer confidence in the management of Covid-19 coronavirus-related claims by insurance and reinsurance companies, mutual benefit associations, and health maintenance organizations, this Commission finds the immediate need to strengthen the existing claims management policies of the above-mentioned industries relative to Covid-19 coronavirusrelated claims,” read the circular letter signed by Funa dated March 16, 2020.

Private-sector initiative

AS the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the country rises, several insurance companies also announced their respective Covid19-related packages.

Some insurance companies have also extended the grace period for premium payments during the time that Luzon is placed under enhanced community quarantine.

Philippine Life Insurance Association (PLIA) President Benedict C. Sison said they have products that benefit clients who may be diagnosed with Covid-19, such as Sun First Aid and their hospital income benefit.

They also pay out daily cash allowances for hospital confinement Continued on A2

n JAPAN 0.4618 n UK 58.7282 n HK 6.5991 n CHINA 7.2013 n SINGAPORE 35.2720 n AUSTRALIA 29.3616 n EU 54.6106 n SAUDI ARABIA 13.6246

Source: BSP (March 20, 2020)

NewsSunday BusinessMirror

A2 Sunday, March 22, 2020

www.businessmirror.com.ph

A MOTORCYCLIST passes an almost-empty street in front of the Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene as the enhanced community quarantine is enforced to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus in downtown Manila, March 19, 2020. AP/AARON FAVILA

A BARANGAY worker from Barangay San Andres in Cainta, Rizal, disinfects Parola, the main thoroughfare, and other streets in the adjacent barangays of San Roque and Santa Rosa to help prevent the spread of Covid-19. BERNARD TESTA

STAYING ALIVE Continued from A1

to help defray the cost of hospitalization, according to Sison, who is also Sun Life Philippines CEO and country manager.

“We have also extended several concessions to those who may be diagnosed with Covid-19, such as extended grace period for premium payments,” Sison said in a message to the BusinessMirror. “Since the rise of Covid-19 earlier this year we had been relentlessly issuing client advisories reminding them of safety precautions and the benefits they may be entitled to.”

While he does not see Covid-19 as a threat to the insurance industry since it is able to service possible claims arising from the illness, Sison conceded that “there may be some challenges on premium collection” since advisors would have difficulty moving around.

Premiums, preparations

HOWEVER, insurance credit ratings agency AM Best said in its report in February that insurance companies may face a decrease in premium revenue and growth challenges, as well as negative development around their investment portfolios resulting from pressures in both credit and equity markets amid Covid-19.

“Note, however, the availability of other payment channels that can help with premium collections.

These days, premium collection is [no longer] limited through advisors or by over-the-counter payment but can also be made online so clients can do it even while practicing social distancing,” Sison said.

On investment portfolios of insurance companies, Funa allayed fears of negative development as majority of assets of insurance companies are exposed to government securities.

Sison also said majority of Sun Life Philippines’ assets that back their liabilities comprise government bonds which have risen in value due to compression of yields.

“Only a small portion of the portfolios [less than 20 percent] are exposed to credits and equities,” he said.

With the spread of Covid-19, Sison said the situation made people more aware of the importance of health insurance and its benefits.

“I would not want to say either that this is an opportunity for the industry as this is a situation that certainly none of us would have wanted,” he added. “Perhaps the only opportunity I see is that of making people aware of the importance of ensuring that they are financially

prepared in the event of these kinds of sicknesses and that insurance companies can help a lot in preparing them financially for these unwanted contingencies.”

For Funa, it is yet too early to predict the full impact of the pandemic and the quarantine on the insurance industry.

What he’s certain is, there will be “no rise in premiums” to cover the risk of those getting infected with Covid-19.

Salceda proposal

HENCE, Salceda said the government through Congress must immediately pass a fiscal stimulus package to help the Philippine economy amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

He recommends particularly the passage of a P190-billion “Filipino Families First” economic stimulus.

The central feature of this stimulus package is its negative-interest loans, two packages which amount to a total of P100 billion, to encourage businesses to retain their employees, the lawmaker said.

Salceda said the first package of negative interest loans would be provided to all companies regardless of size and industry sector, and the maximum loanable amount will be based on the number of employees of the company.

SEN. Manny Pacquiao passes through a disinfecting tent before turning over five tourist buses to Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) General Manager Jojo Garcia and MMDA Chairman Danilo Lim, March 20, 2020. The buses will be used by the agency to provide free rides to health workers and other frontliners during the enhanced community quarantine. NONIE REYES

“Negative interest loans are loans which will be given by the government banks to qualified enterprises, at an interest rate of negative 10 percent. It is to ensure that there is enough liquidity among enterprises, but it will also encourage a sense of co-participation in business recovery and resilience, instead of just being subsidy that could be misallocated by businesses without recovery of costs by the government. The interest rate can be adjusted by the lending banks depending on compliance with its terms,” he added.

The second package of loans will be for the tourism sector, said the lawmaker.

“These loans will allow the tourism sector to remain liquid and invest in productivity-enhancing and promotional strategies that would pay off once the health emergency abates. Like the first package, maximum loanable amount will depend on the number of employees of the borrower,” he added.

Economic vaccine

SALCEDA reiterated his call for the immediate passage of the Corporate Income Tax and Incentives Rationalization Act (Citira) that would act as the “economic vaccine” to this pandemic.

“The full-year impact of Citira is supposed to be 1.01 percent of GDP. But with the delay, it will only reach 0.5 percent of GDP by the time we get this passed,” he added.

Salceda also proposes a P20-billion increase in this year’s budget for the Conditional Cash Transfer, specifically to temporarily cover wageearners affected by the lockdown.

Salceda wants to extend a P10billion support for supply chains of manufacturers of necessary supplies.

He also recommended P10 billion in grants to local government piloting programs to assist small businesses. The said funds are all included in the fiscal stimulus package.

Salceda also recommended that Congress issue temporary spending

and tax relief measures amounting to an additional deficit spending of 1.5 percent above the 2019 deficit of 3.55 percent. He said this translates to P292.5 billion.

Regulatory forbearance

AS businesses face increased difficulty amid the spread of Covid-19 and the enhanced community quarantine, Marikina Rep. Stella Luz A. Quimbo said it is appropriate for all sector regulators to exercise regulatory forbearance on all requirements that are due during the period of quarantine.

“I appeal to the Executive to formally adopt a policy of regulatory forbearance during the quarantine period. This means that the quarantine period effectively stops the clock for requirements with deadlines. All deadlines will be moved to after the quarantine period,” Quimbo said.

“This will make it easier for businesses to temporarily shut down or considerably scale back on their activities, thus, allowing their employees to stay or work at home,” she added.

Earlier, Salceda said his committee is recommending the easing of filing requirements in view of the April 15 deadline set by law on the filing of income tax returns to boost the economy and provide the public relief amid community quarantine measures to fight Covid-19.

Salceda said that the Bureau of Internal Revenue should provide taxpayers with administrative relief, such as considering waiving the penalties for filing tax returns beyond the April 15 deadline.

“It makes sense to extend.

While the April 15 deadline is written in the law, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue can make exceptions in meritorious cases. That’s in the tax code. I understand the Secretary of Finance’s sense that they are constrained. But we have options,” he said.

“We can extend the deadline, or we can temporarily waive the consequences of the deadline, which are penalties and surcharges. It makes sense to do either,” Salceda said.

The BIR on Thursday acquiesced, moving the deadline to May 15 sans penalty to the filer.

Salceda added that the electronic filing and payment system of the BIR will also help avoid face-to-face interactions.

“The Large Taxpayer Service already requires electronic filing.

That’s around 30,000 to 40,000 companies. That accounts for around 68 percent of the revenue the BIR generates. We should ensure that the user experience is easy, so that individual and small taxpayers can navigate the system,” he said.

The World BusinessMirror

Editor: Angel R. Calso

Sunday, March 22, 2020

A3

Small businesses face devastation N

By Joyce M. Rosenberg & Christopher Rugaber

Ap Business Writers

EW YORK—A restaurant owner wonders how she can stay in business if she can’t sell food and drink.

A hair salon operator shuts down to protect his clients and employees.

A photographer who expected to take pictures at an Ivy League school has lost that work now that classes have moved online and campus events are canceled.

Across the countr y, in industries of ever y kind and size, the coronavirus outbreak has devastated small businesses. If they haven’t been ordered to close by government officials, many are shutting down out of concern for employees, customers and clients or simply because business has vanished. Those that are still managing to operate are struggling mightily.

Among the most hard-hit are restaurants, which have had to stop serving diners onsite as government officials in states, counties and cities have ordered them to close to try to contain the virus’s spread. At The Barrel Room, a restaurant in San Francisco’s financial district, Sarah Trubnick had already laid off two-thirds of her staff because of slow business before closing down altogether, along with many other restaurants and bars in the Bay Area.

Tr ubnick ’s restaurant isn’t set up for permitted takeout and delivery. But she’s keeping some staffers working on maintenance and refurbishing projects she had long put off.

“This allows us to maintain health care and reasonable pay for everyone,” she says. “We can sustain this for about two months but have had to defer debt payments and negotiate rent payments.”

“If this situation lasts more than two months,” she adds, “we will need financial assistance.”

Small businesses are a vitally important economic sector of the economy, and their hardships constitute a grave threat to the US economy and to tens of millions of workers and their families.

There are nearly 31 million small businesses in the US, according to government figures. They range from florists and bakeries to barber shops and hardware stores to small factories, restaurants, bookstores and hair salons. Last year, 52 percent of Americans who were employed in the private sector worked for businesses with fewer than 500 employees. Roughly onequarter worked for companies with fewer than 50 employees.

Because so many small businesses lack the cash reserves and credit that’s typically available to larger companies, they are often highly vulnerable to disasters like the coronavirus outbreak.

And many don’t survive. By some estimates, between 170,000 and 200,000 small companies failed during the Great Recession. Many business owners also don’t have the luxury to build rainy-day

A woman leaves an empty nail salon in the South Boston neighborhood of Boston on March 17.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms. For some, it can cause more severe illness, especially in older adults and people with existing health problems.

AP/Charles Krupa

funds. Rather, their cash flow goes to payroll and other regular costs, as well as to such other expenses as renovations and expansions.

For sma l l businesses w it h debts outstanding and little or no revenue coming in, making loan payments may be impossible. Outstanding small business loans—those under $1 million— totaled $370 million at the end of 2019, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. That figure doesn’t even include loans from online banks or from private sources like other companies, relatives and friends.

Especially at risk right now are the youngest small businesses, notes Gene Marks, owner of The Marks Group, a small business consulting firm in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

“If you’re running a restaurant or low-margin business,” Mark says, “you’re really vulnerable when you start up and in the first few years.”

Likewise, companies owned by women and minorities may be

in particular danger now because they struggle disproportionately to obtain to credit that would tide them over during crises.

Business at Sweetcatch Poke, a five-restaurant chain in New York, began falling March 6 and by last Friday, it was down 80 percent from the previous week.

Now limited to takeout and delivery, owner Frank Vellucci has had to reduce employee hours. He now has enough work for about 25 workers, down from his usual 45.

Shifts have been cut in half.

“I’d rather put more people on the schedule and am actually giving them four hours instead of eight,” Vellucci says. “That way, I can get more people getting some income.” For the time being, he plans to keep all his locations open.

But Mark Garrison has closed his Manhattan hair salon. Though New York City officials haven’t shut down salons, “we have to do the socially responsible thing,” Garrison says.

He will keep his 12 stylists and colorists on partial pay while

they’re not working, but his office staff will work from home.

Garrison expects to be closed at least two weeks. He’s well-aware, though, that it could be longer, which would make it hard to pay bills, including $15,000 in property taxes each month.

“How far can I really go before we’re out of business? I don’t even want to entertain that thought.”

The federal government has taken steps to make Small Business Administration disaster loans easier to obtain. They’re now available statewide in states that are hard-hit by the virus, rather than limited to specific counties or parishes where companies have suffered substantial losses. The SBA also said in a statement that it had reminded lenders that they could defer loan payments for six months.

For now, work has fallen off at many businesses as customers and clients have sharply reduced spending. Everyone is worried about making big commitments amid an uncertain economy and tumbling stock market.

“All of our projects are either on hold or are almost finished with construction,” says Leslie Saul, owner of an architect and design firm that bears her name in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We literally have zero income coming in, so we know that every hour that we pay staff is an expense.”

Saul struggled over the weekend over whether to furlough her staff. In the end, she decided to pay them 40 percent of their salaries.

She realized there was still work they could still do, and they could be ready to roll once they’re back to work as usual.

“We’re going to push forward doing things that we hope will bring in new work, like contacting old clients,” Saul says.

The near-complete cancellation of events across the country has left many business owners who are freelancers or who work in the gig economy vulnerable or in limbo.

Cornell University suspended classes at its Ithaca, New York, campus and told students they should return home and begin online classes April 6. Photographer Tom Hoebbel, who expected to spend the spring shooting events at Cornell, now finds himself with an empty schedule and an enormous revenue shortfall.

“It’s usually a huge percentage of what I do, so it’s going to have a huge impact,” Hoebbel says.

Finding work to replace his Cornell gig may prove impossible.

Other schools are closed. Though he can approach businesses, Hoebbel says, “they’re cutting back or cutting hours, and they don’t know where their money is going to come from. Everything is just up in the air.”

The outbreak has hit just as many owners were preparing to sell crafts and other products at spring fairs, markets and shows.

About half of Patti Gibbons’ annual revenue come from events in Washington state, where she sells personal products under the label Heavenly Soap. But many events have been canceled or rescheduled, and Gibbons, who usually attends as many as 50 a year, worries about how many she’ll be able to go to.

The uncertainty has left her rethinking her business model and focusing more on online advertising for her e-commerce site and store in Monroe, Washington.

“I’m spending more time on online marketing—I have my first ad on Instagram and I’m using Facebook more,” Gibbons says.

“I’m making sure all my customers know that I have a web site.” AP

A cruel paradox: Beating virus means causing US recession

W

A S H I N G T O N —T h e coronavirus is dealing a death blow to the longest US economic expansion on record, triggering layoffs and putting intense strain on the nation’s financial system.

In a cruel paradox, the very steps that are needed to contain the outbreak—quarantines, travel restrictions and business closures—are bringing everyday business to a halt and shoving the US economy into recession for the first time since 2009.

“The more rapidly you want to contain the virus, then the more severe the lockdown has to be and the more severe the disruption to economic activity is,’’ said Gregory Daco, chief US economist at Oxford Economics. “The hope is, the more severe the lockdown, the sharper the rebound will be.’’

The “Lockdown Paradox,” he calls it.

Much w i l l depend on how swiftly and aggressively the Federal Reserve, Congress and the Trump administration deliver financial aid to tens of millions of economic victims—from hourly workers with no more income to suddenly furloughed employees to businesses with loans to pay but no customers. Solving the health crisis by shutting down the economy, though, will have to come first.

The US economy has never endured anything like this. The economic shock from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, painful as it was, was shortlived. The financial crisis and the Great Recession were devastating.

But they weren’t intertwined with a calamitous health crisis.

In the near term, at least, Daco foresees excruciating economic

pain: He expects the American economy to shrink at a staggering 12-percent annual rate in the April-June quarter. That would be the most dismal quarter on record dating back to 1947. After a second-half rebound, Daco thinks the economy will post zero growth for 2020 as a whole.

Financial markets are bracing for the worst. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down more than 1,300 points in late-morning trading and has plunged more than 9,600 points or 33 percent since February 12.

The economy has deteriorated with stunning speed. And the United States is hardly alone: The UN’s International Labor Organization estimates that the coronavirus outbreak could lead to nearly 25 million job losses worldwide and drain up to $3.4 trillion worth of income by year’s end.

In the United States, a wave of layoffs has just started, especially in industries most vulnerable to an economic standstill: Travel, entertainment, hotels, restaurants, retail stores—the heart of the service sector, which makes up most of the US economy. Unemployment is sure to rise, perhaps sharply, in the months ahead.

“The US has 2.6 million waiters and waitresses, nearly all of whom will be unemployed by Friday,” said Michael Hicks, an economist who directs Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research. “The April 3 jobs report [for March] will be the single-worst monthly job report in US history.

The record is 1.96 million job losses in September 1945, right after V-J Day.’’

A few shoppers wander through the empty hallways of an outlet mall on Tuesday, March 17, 2020, in Lakewood, Colorado. Many of the stores were closed in the mall because of the coronavirus outbreak. AP/David Zalubowski

“We are already in recession,’’ said Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, an association of financial companies.

Brooks reckons that the US g ross domestic product—t he broadest gauge of economic output—will fall at a 0.2-percent annual rate in the January-March quarter and then by 3.6 percent in the April-June period.

Even President Donald J. Trump, ever celebratory of the economy’s performance on his watch, conceded this week that the US “may be’’ heading toward a downturn.

Statistics that will capture the economic damage from the virus and the efforts to contain it are just beginning to surface. For now, Brooks fears “all the things we don’t see: The social distancing, the quarantining and the uncertainty aren’t in the hard data yet.’’

The early evidence is sobering: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported on Monday that manufacturing activity in New York state plunged this month to the lowest level since the Great Recession year of 2009.

On Tuesday, hotel executives, whose book ings have sw iftly dried up, took their worries to the White House.

“I personally lived through many crises, starting with the S&L, the 9/11 crisis, the Great Recession,” said Hilton’s CEO, Christopher Nassetta. “I’ve been doing this for 35 years. Never seen anything like it.”

Chip Rogers, president and CEO of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, noted that hotels last year were, on average, roughly 67 percent full.

Now? “ We’re probably u nder 20 percent nationwide and headed south,” he said. “If, by the end of the year, we get up to 35 percent and nothing else happens, that will be about 4 million jobs lost.”

The speed with which the virus broke out of China and traversed the globe caught forecasters off guard. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said on Sunday that the Fed won’t even bother to issue its usual quarterly economic forecasts this week.

Its economic view, after all, depends on how the virus outbreak

evolves, “and that’s just not something that’s knowable,” Powell acknowledged to reporters. “So, actually writing down a forecast in that circumstance didn’t seem to be useful.’’

On Wednesday, the economy continued to shut down. A person briefed on the matter said Detroit’s three automakers have agreed to close all their factories due to worker fears about the coronavirus. The United Auto Workers union has been pushing for factories to close because workers are fearful of coming into contact with the virus.

The governor of Hawaii encouraged everyone to postpone vacations there for at least 30 days.

Nevada’s governor ordered all casinos to close for the month. Major casinos have ceased operations on the Las Vegas Strip.

Compounding the threat, oil prices started to tumble in the face of weakening global growth.

Plummeting prices, though welcome to motorists, threatened to discourage investment by US energy companies that contributes to economic growth.

Trouble in the oil patch, in turn, put pressure on deeply indebted oil and gas exploration and drilling companies. This trend intensified fears over the health of the corporate bond market where companies go to borrow.

As the economic outlook darkened, financial markets began to crumble—brought down, too, by the US government’s fumbling initial response to the crisis. Despite a strong rebound on Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average remains down more than 8,300 points, or 28 percent, since February 12.

Tumbling markets are more than a symptom of economic distress. They can cause it, too. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, calculates that every $1 of wealth lost to falling stock prices reduces by nearly a nickel spending by consumers, who drive about 70 percent of US economic activity.

After a slow start, US policymakers are moving aggressively to limit the damage. The Fed on Sunday slashed its benchmark rate to nearly zero and said it would buy $700 billion in bonds to try to ease credit market disruptions and keep long-term rates low. On Tuesday, the Fed said it would take steps to ease the flow of the shortterm credit that businesses use for payrolls and other everyday costs.

In a recognition of the gravity of the threat, the Trump administration is backing a roughly $850-billion emergency stimulus package, which would include sending checks directly to American households to help tide them over during the disruption.

Will it all work?

Zandi at Moody’s Analytics said the economy’s return to health depends not just on what happens to the virus and how policy-makers respond. Also crucial is the mindset of ordinary consumers and business owners whose lives have been upended by the health crisis.

“How long it takes for businesses to feel confident enough to allow their employees to get back to work and travel and for tourists to get back on planes and cruise ships... whether the collective psyche holds together,’’ he says.

Paul Wiseman/Ap Economics Writer

(AP staffer Kevin Freking contributed to this report)

A4

The World BusinessMirror

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Lockdowns and $3 trillion in aid power global Covid-19 response

A

s the coronavirus extends its reach around the globe, schools and universities are closing; lockdowns have become commonplace; non-essential businesses like cinemas, gyms, clubs, bars and restaurants are shut; and companies are asking employees to work from home wherever possible.

To help meet the costs of all this, governments around the world have pledged or are considering as much as $3 trillion in fiscal support. That aid ranges from guarantees on bank loans to tax deferments and even to cash handouts.

The European Central Bank has boosted liquidity for banks in the euro area and loosened capital demands, and is buying an additional €120 billion ($132 billion) of the region’s bonds. The US is weighing a $1.2 trillion stimulus. The European Union, all 27 of whose member-states have announced protective measures, closed its borders.

Below is a country-by-country list of broad actions taken or planned by governments of G-20 nations to counter what has turned into the deadliest pandemic in more than a century.

Argentina

n Central bank may compel private banks to lend to companies. n Domestic travel suspended for coming holiday weekend.

Schools, borders closed through end of March. Government considering ordering everyone to stay at home for 10 days. n More than 4 million retirees to get a one-time payment in April.

Australia

n Cut benchmark interest rate to 0.25 percent. Government expected to release a second stimulus package after an initial A$17.6 billion ($10.6 billion) to support the economy. n All citizens warned to avoid overseas travel indefinitely. n Non-essential gatherings of more than 100 people banned.

Brazil

Government plans to spend about $30 billion, half of which will be used to help the poor and elderly. n Lenders given more flexibilit y to use capita l and measures a nnou nced to fac i l it ate debt negot i at ions.

n

Canada n

Government set aside C$1

billion ($702 million) in funding and C$10 billion in new credit. It may buy as much as C$50 billion in home mortgages. Additional fiscal stimulus was to be announced Wednesday. n Closed borders to most foreigners, and citizens were advised to avoid non-essential travel. n Central bank cut rates by full percentage point; loosened capital requirements to boost lending.

China

n Central bank pumped 550 bil-

lion yuan ($78 billion) of liquidity into the banking system by cutting reserve requirements. Taxes cut for virus-hit companies, and there are plans to spend more on infrastructure. Debt cap increased to help smaller companies raise funds overseas. n Beijing quarantines all travelers from overseas for two weeks; Shanghai quarantines arrivals from 16 countries. n Most public venues, including schools, remain closed.

France

n Ban on unnecessary movement,

fines for non-compliance. Nonessential services, schools, bars, restaurants, clubs, gyms closed.

Grocery stores, pharmacies open. n Testing and tracking only if doctors consider crucial. n Emergency budget to include €45 billion of spending and €300 billion of loan guarantees.

Germany

n Most public and private venues

such as bars, cinemas and museums closed. Non-essential services shut; supermarkets open, including on Sundays. n All people with unexplained respiratory symptoms to be tested. n Government to make as much as €550 billion available in lending for businesses from German state bank KfW.

India

n Central

bank boosts cash injection through 13.5 billion rupees ($181 million) of long-term repo operations and $2 billion for the foreign-exchange market.

n Most inbound travel visas sus-

pended; arrivals prohibited from some countries. n Residents asked to avoid nonessential travel; schools, gyms, museums and theaters closed.

Indonesia

Centr al bank expected to cut its policy rate; bank bought billions of dollars of government bonds and intervened in currency markets to stabilize the rupiah. n Government stimulus package increased to 33.22 trillion rupiah ($2.19 billion). n Mosques urged worshippers to stay at home.

n

Italy

n Non-essen ti a l ser vices, schools closed; unnecessary movement banned in a lockdown. n Testing and tracking only for patients showing symptoms. n 25 billion-euro package, including loan guarantees, takeover of Alitalia and funds for businesses and individuals. Short-selling banned for 90 days.

Japan

n Central bank raised the upper limit of its annual ETF purchase target to 12 trillion yen ($112 billion). n Government urged residents to halt travel to most of Europe; inbound travelers from Europe need to self-quarantine. n Some government officials signaled a possible delay of the Tokyo Olympics.

Mexico

n Set aside about $150 million in aid. n Schools set to close next week.

Russia

Ban on entry to most foreigners; schools closed. n Free tests for people who’ve visited high-risk countries. n $4 billion fund to assist businesses and individuals; tax payments deferred. Central bank sold 22 billion rubles in foreign currencies.

n

Saudi Arabia

n Land crossings closed and international flights halted; pilgrimages to Mecca banned. Nonessential services closed. n Testing for those with symptoms. Self-quarantine for those who have come in contact with infected people. n Package worth 50 billion riyals ($13.3 billion) in loans and loan guarantees to businesses.

South Africa

n National disaster declared; gatherings of more than 100 people banned; schools, 35 of 53 land crossings closed; access closed to

travelers from high-risk countries. n Testing available for those with symptoms. n Government working on measures to minimize economic impact; central bank may cut interest rate by 50 basis points on Thursday.

South Korea

n Central bank cut benchmark

interest rate to record low. Government to accelerate special 11.7 trillion won ($9.4 billion) budget; cap on banks’ foreign-exchange forward positions eased by 25 percent. n Testing widespread, covering more than 10,000 people a day; test results accelerated. n Travel advisory alert raised for some European countries; school reopening delayed.

Turkey

n School, mosques, non-essential

services shut; flights to and from 20 countries suspended; about 10,000 citizens returning from pilgrimage to Mecca quarantined. n Central bank cut one-week repo rate by a percentage point, added liquidity into markets by cutting amount of foreign-exchange lenders must park and postponing foreign-exchange debt repayments by exporters.

United Kingdom

n Public advised to avoid all non-

essential travel overseas, as well as use of public transport, gatherings with friends and family; limiting interaction with others by people over 70. n Testing to be increased and those with symptoms asked to self-isolate at home for seven days; if living with others, not leave the house for 14 days. n Government promised help with mortgage payments, and support for airlines, shops and the hospitality industry, with 350 billion pounds ($424 billion) of government-backed loans, grants and tax cuts.

United States

Government advises people not to congregate in groups of more than 10 and suggests states close schools; about 75 percent of schools closed nationwide. n Congress debates $1.2 trillion in spending, including direct payments of $1,000 or more to Americans within two weeks. n Twenty states ordered restaurants, bars or both closed to sit-down customers. New York City may order citizens to shelterin-place after closing all bars, restaurants and theaters. Residents of the San Francisco Bay Area ordered to stay at home. n Ohio canceled March 17 presidential primary election and closed schools. Bloomberg News n

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Wuhan reports no new virus cases, offering hope to world

By Ken Moritsugu & Nick Perry

B

The Associated Press

EIJING—Last month, Wuhan was overwhelmed with thousands of new cases of coronavirus each day, but in a dramatic development that underscores just how much the outbreak has pivoted toward Europe and the United States, Chinese authorities said on Thursday that the city and its surrounding province had no new cases to report.

The news offered a rare glimmer of hope for the rest of the world as it battles the virus, and perhaps a lesson in the strict measures needed to halt its spread. It came as President Donald Trump likened the fight to “a war” and invoked emergency authority to marshal industry to deal with the pandemic.

Wuhan was where the outbreak first took hold and thousands once lay sick or dying in hurriedly constructed hospitals.

But Chinese authorities said on Thursday that all 34 new cases recorded over the previous day had been imported from abroad. “Today we have seen the dawn after so many days of hard effort,” said Jiao Yahui, a senior inspector of the national health commission.

Still the virus continued to take its toll elsewhere, both human and economic.

Stocks tumbled again on Wall Street on fears of a prolonged recession, falling so fast they triggered another automatic trading halt, while major US auto manufacturers said they were shutting down their North American factories.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed more than 1,300 points on Wednesday, or over 6 percent, and has now lost nearly all of the gains it had posted since Trump’s inauguration. Oil dropped below $21 per barrel for the first time since 2002. Shares in Asia continued their slide on Thursday.

Around the world, countries shut down their borders. The US and Canada both closed their borders to all but essential travel and Trump said he plans to assert extraordinary powers to immediately turn back to Mexico anyone who crosses over the southern border illegally.

The White House pressed Congress to swiftly pass a potentially $1-trillion rescue package to prop up the economy and speed relief checks to Americans in a matter of weeks.

Calling himself a “wartime president,” Trump invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 to steer industrial output and overcome shortages of face masks, ventilators and other supplies as hospitals brace for an expected onslaught of cases.

The Korean War-era law gives the president extraordinary authority to compel industries to expand production and turn out vital materials. It was most recently used after the 2017 Puerto Rico hurricane to speed up contracts for food and other necessities.

“It’s a war,” Trump said, likening the coronavirus fight to measures taken during World War II and warning of national sacrifices ahead.

While China did not report any new cases in Wuhan or Hubei province it did record eight additional deaths.

Jiao Yahui said they were “delighted to see this double-zero increase” which meant their control and medical treatment methods were working well.

Wuhan has been under a stric t lockdown since January. Officials are moving to loosen travel restrictions, but only inside the surrounding province of Hubei where most checkpoints will be taken down. Wuhan remains cut-off, with only those with special permission allowed to travel in or out.

The lockdown will be lifted there only if no additional cases are reported for two

Virus redefines respecting personal space R OME—S ocial distancing could qualify as an oxymoron in Italy, where walking arm-in-arm with friends, kissing neighbors in greeting and patting the heads of babies are part of the demonstrative culture.

But a new virus has rapidly redefined the concept of respecting personal space for tactile Italians, as well as for South Koreans, Filipinos, Americans, Spaniards and citizens of many other crowded parts of the world.

Whether acting under government orders or following basic public health advice, people are putting distance between themselves to keep the coronavirus away. The new rules of engagement call for maintaining a gap of 1 to 2 meters (or 3 to 6 feet) to

prevent possible exposure when an infected individual coughs or speaks.

The Covid-19 illness causes mild or moderate symptoms in most of those infected, but severe symptoms are more likely in the elderly or people with existing health problems. The vast majority of those infected recover.

The reset norm for an acceptable degree of separation became visible evidence of the pandemic’s reach as schools, shopping malls and sports venues closed and opportunities for public encounters dwindled. Outside a gun shop in California, a post office in Hungary and a supermarket in Manila, lines lengthened as customers queued up at more or less proper intervals.

Practicing social distancing at first created confusion among shoppers waiting at a supermarket in Madrid. Some harsh exchanges ensued. But customers soon learned that if they wanted their groceries, they needed to fall into line.

The safe space standards also reveal how closely humans positioned themselves before. Pastors at a church in Seoul had room to spread out in empty pews after deciding to conduct Sunday services online. Journalists at a news conference in Berlin sat in chairs spaced away from one another.

A nationwide decree that took effect in Italy last week obliges people to stay at least 1 meter (about 3 feet) apart. Overnight, habits of a lifetime and of an entire society

were turned upside down.

In a country where waiting your turn often equates to elbowing your way to the front of an undisciplined pack, Italians dutifully lined up with breaks in between—1 meter, 2 meters, sometimes standing across the street from each other to keep stores uncrowded and themselves from getting Covid-19.

Shopkeepers whipped out measuring tapes.

“I have seen a lot of discipline, solidarity and collaboration, and everybody understands that the first that falls will pull the others with him,’’ said Piero Emilio Vincenzi, owner of an appliance store near the Vatican. AP

People line up to enter in a shop to buy supplies in Barcelona, Spain, on March 17. AP/Emilio Morenatti

consecutive weeks, which may happen next month, Li Lanjuan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, was quoted as saying.

The virus has infected more than 218,000 people worldwide and killed over 8,800, mostly in China, Italy and Iran. The United Nations warned that the crisis could lead to the loss of nearly 25 million jobs around the world.

More than 84,000 people overall have recovered from the virus, which causes only mild or moderate symptoms such as fever and cough in most cases. Severe illness is more likely in the elderly and those with existing health problems.

Though China still has the largest number of cases, most of its patients have recovered. China even sent medical supplies to hard-hit France, returning a favor done by the French weeks ago.

But in a grim illustration of the pandemic’s shift, deaths in Italy were nearing China’s toll. Italy had more than 2,900 dead after a record one-day total of 475; China’s overall toll was around 3,200. Iran has also been hit hard, with more than 1,100 deaths.

Around the globe, governments took increasingly drastic measures to fight the epidemic and the threat of a recession, in some cases using emergency powers.

California’s governor warned that mar tial law could be imposed. The mayor of New York said the city’s 8.6 million residents should be prepared for a lockdown. The US Census Bureau suspended field operations for two weeks, soon after it began its once-a-decade count of American people.

Czech authorities used emergency powers to raid a warehouse and seize hundreds of thousands of face masks. And Hong Kong widened the use of electronic wristbands that monitor people under self-quarantine.

With a growing number of Americans thrown out of work by the near-shutdown of much of the US economy, Trump also said the Housing and Urban Development Department will suspend foreclosures and evictions from public housing.

The Trump administration’s plan for issuing relief checks to Americans calls for the payment of $500 billion in two installments over the next two months.

The amounts have yet to be decided but would be based on income and family size.

Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler, along with Honda and Toyota, said they will shut all of their factories in the US, Canada and Mexico. The closing of Detroit’s Big Three alone will idle about 150,000 workers, who are likely to receive supplemental pay in addition to unemployment benefits.

At GM’s pickup truck assembly plant in Flint, Michigan, workers have been fearful since the virus surfaced in the US, said Tommy Wolikow, who has two young daughters.

“That’s the thing that I was scared the most about, being the one to bring it home to them,” he said.

The US has reported more than 9,400 coronavirus cases and at least 138 deaths, about half of them in Washington state, where dozens of residents from a suburban Seattle nursing home have died.

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida is the first known member of Congress to test positive for the virus. Other members of Congress have self-quarantined, but none have reported positive test results.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who last week announced he tested positive, is sharing his experience in a daily YouTube diary and on Twitter as he runs the city from home isolation. His wife and children are staying with relatives. AP

Science

www.businessmirror.com.ph • Editor: Lyn Resurreccion

BusinessMirror

Sunday

Sunday, March 22, 2020 A5

D.O.S.T. lines up researches, services to address COVID-19 concerns

VCO eyed as cure for Covid-19 T

By Lyn Resurreccion

the disease among close contacts and sy mptomatic proportion of Cov id-19 cases in the Philippines.

The study, led by Dr. Mayan U. Lumandas of the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, will use samples from the institute.

It a ims to supply t he De partment of Health useful data which can improve national effor ts in case isolation, contact t rac i ng , a nd d isea se cont rol a nd prevent ion.

Mary Ann Pacho of PCHRD told the BusinessMirror in a telephone inter v iew that the study is expected to help develop recommendations and g uidelines for case definition and surveillance to manage Covid-19.

In getting patter ns of Cov i d -19 t r a n s m i s s i o n , Pa c ho said the collected data can help identif y strategies that may reduce the potentia l spread and impact of infection.

he Philippines was recently placed under a state of calamity after President Duterte imposed a Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine to contain the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19) that has affected the country with a total of 217 cases, eight recoveries and 17 deaths as of Thursday afternoon.

The surge in the number of people infected was described by the World Health Organization as a global pandemic. It has killed more than 9,370 and infected over 227,700 others worldwide as of Thursday.

A mid this situation, the Depar tment of Science and Technolog y (DOST) has lined up researches and ser v ices focused to treat people infected w ith or manage Cov id-19, and prov ide aid to the public affected by the lockdwon.

VCO versus Covid-19

Among the researches Science Secretar y For tunato T. de la Peña, with the DOST-Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (DOST-PCHRD), has enumerated is the testing of virgin coconut oil (VCO) for its anti-Covid-19 virus properties.

Titled, “In-vitro Study on the Efficacy of Lauric Acid and its Derivatives against SARS-CoV-2,” the project is a partnership between Ateneo de Manila University (AdMU) and the DukeNational University of Singapore (Duke-NUS). In-vitro means a process performed in a test tube or culture dish.

The PCHRD-funded project aims to test whether certain coconut oil components, such as lauric acid, can determine the antiviral properties, diminish or prevent the causing of infection of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

The results will be used for further studies.

Dr. Fabian M. Dayrit, project leader, told the BusinessMirror

in a telephone interview that his team is already preparing the samples which will be sent to Duke-NUS. He said the result of the test may be available in two months, citing the lockdowns caused by the growth in number of Covid-19 infections as a constraint in speeding up the study.

“We have prepared the samples in order to test in Singapore the components of VCO, to check whether they would lower or reduce the ability of the coronavirus to infect people,” Dayrit said.

Optimistic about the test results, Dayrit explained that VCO has already shown the “history of its efficacy against many viruses.”

However, it still has to be tested to “determine the dosage” that is effective against Covid-19.

He further explained that the test has to be done in Singapore because the Philippines has no laboratory to isolate the coronavirus and in order to observe the biosafety levels.

In the paper, “ The Potential of Coconut Oil and its Derivatives as Effective and Safe Antiviral Agents Against the Novel Coron av i r u s (nCoV-2019), dated Januar y 31, Dayrit and Dr. Mar y T. New port, MD, said “ lauric acid and monolaurin, its derivative, have been known for many years to have significant antiviral activity.”

They said the antiviral activity of lauric acid and monolaurin are explained in three mechanisms: “First, they cause disintegration of the virus envelope; second, they can inhibit late maturation stage in the virus replicative cycle; and

Likewise, a 35 percent gel of monolaurin was developed for application in the female genital tract to protect against HIV. At the same time, they said, “coconut oil itself has been shown to have anti-HIV properties in small clinical studies.”

Test kits Dr. Fabian M. Dayrit ADMU

third, they can prevent the binding of viral proteins to the host cell membrane.”

“Coconut oil and its derivatives have been show n to be s a fe a nd e f fe c t ive a nt iv i r a l compounds in both humans and animals. Because of the antiviral and antibacterial protection that it provides to animals, coconut oil, as well as lauric acid and monolaurin, is used in farm animals and pets as veterinary feed supplements in chicken, swine and dogs [Baltic et al., 2017]. Monol au r i n h a s been show n to ef fect ively protect chicken against avian inf luenza virus [van der Sluis, 2015],” the duo said in the paper.

They also cited that monolaurin was found to be highly active aga inst repeated high viral loads of Simian immunodeficiency virus in macaques.

The public is already familiar with the Covid-19 test kits funded

by DOST-PCHRD and was developed by Dr. Raul V. Destura of the University of the PhilippinesNational Institutes of Health (UPNIH), Philippine Genome Center and the Manila HealthTek Inc. The Covid-19 diagnostic kits that are being produced by Manila HealthTek will soon be made available by the end of March to hospitals handling patients after the kits were tested.

Transmission patterns

To help policy-makers create better and evidence-based strategies in addressing the Covid-19 pandemic, Filipino researchers are investigating the coronav i r u s t ra nsm i ssion pat ter ns among confirmed cases and their contacts in the country.

T he ongoing study f unded

by DOST-PCHR D is ex pected to y ield data on transmission dy namics, secondar y infection rate and clinica l-attack rate of

Application for early detection

The Ateneo de Manila University’s researchers developed a modeling tool with the application “Feasibility Analysis of Syndromic Surveillance Using a Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler for Early Detection of Diseases [FASSSTER]” to predict the duration of the Covid-19 outbreak using DOH and other data and information.

A Web - a nd mobi le - ba sed surveillance and response tool, FA SSS T ER i s a l so bei ng enhanced to visualize real-time updates on the numbers of Covid-19-related information in the country.

500,000 reusable face masks

DOST ’s Philippine Textile Research Institute (DOST-PTRI), in cooperation with the local government unit (LGU) of Taytay and the private sector, will produce 500,000 face masks that can be reused up to 50 times.

T he PTR I w ill use textilecoating technolog y for treatment and finishing.

It w i l l col l aborate w it h t he Po w e r Fa s h io n I nc . t o p ro duce m a sk s u si ng loc a l f iber te x t i les. Power Fa sh ion w i l l don ate t he te x t i les.

A l so, t he Ph i l ippi ne I n st it ute of Volc a nolog y a nd Se i s molo g y w i l l m a k e av a i l a ble

u nu sed m a sk s t h at were readied du r i ng t he a sh f a l l du r i ng t he Ta a l Er upt ion.

Processed food production

The DOST-Industrial Technology Development Institute (ITDI) will open its Food Innovation Facilities for the production of processed food.

It will also make available immediately 15,000 packs of ready-to-eat arrozcaldo chicken and 3,000 packs of rice meal for distribution in regions.

For its part, the DOST-Food and Nutrition Research Institute will provide complimentary food for babies and children.

They are available in 37 technology adopters which are either LGUs, state universities and colleges, nongovernment organizations or private enterprises in different regions.

Hand sanitizer, rubbing alcohol making

DOST-ITDI will also offer online livelihood training or e-learning courses for hand gel sanitizer, rubbing alcohol, antibacterial soap and processed foods.

Thermal camera as temperature scanner

DOST-A dva nced Sc ience a nd Technolog y Institute (DOSTASTI) can use their new satellite imagery plus other complementary data in providing useful data analytics, e.g., movement of people, etc.

DOST-ASTI will also accelerate its research in developing a small thermal camera that can be attached to smart phones to be used as temperature scanner.

Bilateral partners for clinical trials

Foreign bilateral partners are being contacted for possible clinical trials in the Philippines for the vaccine or drug they have developed in their R&D centers.

Evacuation tent designs

The DOST-Metals Industr y Research and Development Center has ready desig ns for evacuation tents, hospita l beds and c r u sh i ng m ac h i ne for s pent medica l v ia ls.

They also have agro-machine r ies des i g n s for l ive l i ho o d pur poses.

Canadian firm announces breakthrough in possible plant-based Covid-19 vaccine

By Clement Dionglay

Special to the BusinessMirror

W

hen the first case of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19) was reported in China in late December last year, no one expected that it will spread far and wide, and become a global pandemic.

As more and more confirmed cases and deaths were recorded in China and many other parts of the world, including the Philippines, the search for a promising Covid-19 medicine and vaccine became the most important task for many scientists and researchers.

Canadian biotech company Medicago has made a breakthrough in the fight against the Covid-19.

In a news release on March 12, the Quebec City-based company announced that it has developed a possible Covid-19 vaccine candidate using its proprietary p l a nt - b a s e d te c h n o l o g y — a s e t o f applications, tools, processes, or systems that are property of an individual or business.

Th e a n n o u n c e m e n t c a m e a f t e r Medicago scientists produced a virus-

like particle (VLP) of the coronavirus just 20 days after receiving the SARS-CoV-2 (virus causing the Covid-19 disease) genetic sequence.

VLPs are molecules that closely resemble viruses, but do not contain any viral genetic material so they are noninfectious.

Vaccine development is a long process, and the production of the VLP is the first step in developing a vaccine for Covid-19 which will now undergo preclinical trials to test its safety and effectiveness.

O nce this process is completed, Medicago said they will begin human trials of the vaccine as early as July or August 2020 following approvals from Health Canada and other agencies.

Medicago CEO Dr. Bruce Clark said that if the vaccine is successful it could be available to the market by November 2021.

“The pace of our initial progress in Covid-19 is attributable to the capability of our plant-based platform which is able to produce vaccine and antibody solutions to counteract this global public health threat,” he said.

If the company is given the green light, it could produce as many as 10 million

doses a month, according to Clark.

The company’s first product, a seasonal recombinant quadrivalent VLP vaccine for active immunization against influenza, is now under review by Health Canada following the completion of a robust safety and efficacy clinical program involving over 25,000 patients.

Medicago’s plant-based technology is a potential alternative to traditional egg-based production systems.

Traditional vaccine production requires using a lot of eggs to grow the virus.

However, this practice is not only

expensive but it also takes a long time and is far from perfect.

Egg-based vaccines are also risky to children and adults who have an allergy to eggs.

It should be noted that Medicago does not work with live viruses but uses plants instead.

Its technology inser ts a genetic sequence into the soil bacterium Agrobacterium, which is taken up by plants. The plant begins to produce the protein that can then be used as a vaccine.

If the virus begins to mutate, as is

expected for Covid-19, they can just update the production using new plants.

“That’s the difference between us and egg-based methods,” Clark said. “We go directly to producing the vaccine or the antibody without having to propagate the virus.”

Using plants and genetically engineered Agrobacterium works faster than eggs and also makes the vaccine much easier to produce at scale.

Genetic engineering makes possible for scientists to engineer living organisms from simple yeasts to more complex plants to produce specific pharmaceuticals, such as antibodies and vaccines.

Biopharmaceuticals are drug products produced in living systems and used for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes or as dietary supplements. Using plants to express proteins is more practical, safe, and economical as plant systems allow production with low start-up costs.

The first full-size native protein expressed in plants was human serum albumin, produced in 1990 in transgenic tobacco and potato plants.

Besides tobacco, cereal grains, such as rice, wheat, barley, and corn are also

being used to produce plant-derived pharmaceuticals.

Potato was the first system to be d e ve l o p e d f o r va cc i n e p ro d u c t i o n , followed by tomatoes, bananas, carrots, lettuce, corn, alfalfa, spinach, white clover, and thale-cress as alternative production hosts.

The Covid-19 is an infectious disease caused by a new virus that is worse than the flu.

It has been declared by the World Health Organization as a pandemic and particularly puts some people at a higher risk of getting very sick, including older adults, pregnant women, and people with underlying medical conditions including heart disease, diabetes, lung disease, asthma and HIV. As of March 19, 2020, the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker reports that there are 218,743 confirmed cases of Covid-19 diagnosed across the globe. Of these, there have been 8,810 recorded deaths and 84,113 recoveries.

In the Philippines, the Department of Health (DOH) has recorded 202 confirmed cases of coronavirus Covid-19, with nine deaths and five recoveries as of March 18.

Faith A6 Sunday, March 22, 2020

Sunday

Editor: Lyn Resurreccion •www.businessmirror.com.ph

Migrant Filipinos in Rome invoke intercession of ‘La Virgen Milagrosa de Badoc’ on Covid-19

R

OME, Italy—It has been days since the start of the national lockdown for the whole of Italy that Filipinos in Rome have been pleading the intercession of “La Virgen Milagrosa de Badoc” to stop the pandemic caused by Covid-19.

Filipino migrants are praying the novena to the miraculous virgin since March 15, the sixth day of the lockdown.

Cynthia de la Cruz, former coordinator of Sacro Cuore di Gesù Filipino community, has spearheaded the online novena. Filipinos in Rome follow her daily Facebook posts and do their prayer

privately or as a family in home confinement.

“I have been receiving favors through her intercession. With that, I thought of turning to her and ask that this present crisis be stopped. I believe her coming to Europe carries a great mission and that is to bring Europe back to faith,” de la Cruz explained.

Bishop Renato Mayugba of Laoag presents replicas of “La Virgen Milagrosa de Badoc” to Pope Francis at the Vatican on May 20, 2019. VATICAN MEDIA

“May the end of the pandemic, through her [La Virgen Milagrosa de Badoc] intercession, become a concrete sign for Italians to realize that faith in God alone can contain insurmountable human

odds. This became my motive to stir fellow Filipino migrants to prayer by posting everyday the novena’s daily intentions,” she said.

A small replica of La Virgen Milagrosa de Badoc was brought by

Bishop Renato Mayugba of Laoag at the Basilica di Santa Pudenziana, the National Church of Filipinos in Rome, last year. Since then, the image has been visiting Filipino houses until it was brought back to the basilica before the lockdown.

History recalls that when the Ilocos region in the Philippines was struck by epidemics, the help of the miraculous image was sought.

It was recorded that in 1656 and 1660, since the image was brought to Vigan, her presence would quell the crisis in that epidemic-stricken town.

The chronicle states: “The believers, though drained by anguish, offered prayers and simple gifts which the compassionate Celestial Patroness repaid with bountiful showers of temporal and spiritual favors.”

As of this posting, Italy remains

to be the most affected country outside of China, with more than 1,800 deaths out of more than 24,740 cases.

With the daily increase of infected individuals, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that Italian health facilities may not be enough to accommodate more cases. For this, it is necessary to apply criteria for access to intensive treatment.

Some doctors have also figured out about making life-or-death decisions on who can be treated and who may effectively be left to die.

An Italian physician has described: “A patient’s fate is decided by age and health conditions.”

He added, “This is how it is in a war.” With this, if the situation worsens, those patients above 80 years would not be accorded with intensive care.

Vatican Media via CBCP News

Caloocan diocese offers churches as ‘field of hospitals’

A

C atholic d iocese i n Metro Manila has offered its churches and schools as temporary “field of hospitals” for coronavirus patients if the need arises.

Bishop Pablo Virgilio David of Caloocan said the diocese is willing to open its facilities in the event that public health facilities become insufficient.

“If we need to open our churches, chapels and schools and turn them into temporary field hospitals for the sick, we should do so in the name of Christian compassion and charity,” David said.

People washing up to pray inside the eastern wall of Badshahi Mosque. Wikimedia Commons

“Let us make ourselves ready to volunteer and mobilize other volunteers to assist the public sector in attending to the victims,” he said.

The bishop made the statement in a circular released on March 14, as the government placed Metro Manila under lockdown due to the spread of coronavirus.

The Department of Health reported that, as of March 18, the total number of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19) infected persons in the country is 202, with seven recoveries and 17 deaths.

Bishop David also enjoined the faithful to be particularly mindful of the poor, “especially those among them who are bound to be severely affected by this current crisis.”

“Let us, as members of the Body of Christ, take this crisis as an opportunity to express genuine care and compassion to the least of our brothers and sisters,” he said.

Caloocan is among the dioceses across the Philippines that suspended public Masses and other church activities as preventive actions to help avert the spread of the deadly virus.

In Metro Manila, all public Masses have been canceled until April 14, as the government implemented a “community quarantine” and prohibited public assemblies.

This also means the liturgical celebrations during Holy Week will not be open to the public.

“There will be no public blessing of palms, no Visita Iglesia, Siete Palabras, Good Friday procession and Easter Salubong,” David said.

“However, we encourage the faithful to stay home and follow the said activities on TV, radio, or online,” he added.

What Islamic hygienic practices can teach when coronavirus is spreading Number of Hispanic Catholics in US is big, but priests are few

A

s outbreaks of the coronavirus spread throughout the world, people are reminded over and again to limit physical contact, wash hands and avoid touching their face.

The recent Netflix docuseries Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak illustrates how the Islamic ritual washing, known as wudu, may help spread a good hygiene message.

The series focuses on Syra Madad, a Muslim public health specialist in a New York hospital, who takes a break to say her prayers at the Islamic Center of New York University.

Before entering the prayer room, Madad stops to perform wudu, and washes her mouth and face, as well as her feet.

Islamic law requires Muslims to ritually purify their body before praying. As a scholar of Islamic studies who researches ritual practices among Muslims, I have found that these practices contain both spiritual and physical benefits.

Ritual purity

The Prophet Muhammad left detailed guidance for Muslims on how to live their lives, including how to pray, fast and stay ritually pure. This guidance is available in collections called the Hadith.

According to Islamic law, there are minor and major impurities. Minor impurities involve urinating, defecating and sleeping, among other practices.

A person of Muslim faith is supposed to perform a ritual washing of their bodies before praying to get rid of these minor impurities.

Wudu is to be performed, as was done by the Prophet Muhammad, in a specific order before praying, which takes place five times a day.

Before each prayer, Muslims are expected to wash themselves in a certain order—first hands, then mouth, nose, face, hair and ears, and finally their ankles and feet.

While washing with water is required when it is available, if a person has limited access to water, then a Muslim is permitted to symbolically “cleanse” their hands and face with dust or sometimes sand or other natural materials.

A Quranic verse says: “And if you are ill or on a journey or one of you comes from the place of relieving himself or you have contacted women and find no water, then seek clean Earth and wipe over your faces and your hands [with it].

Indeed, God is ever Pardoning and Forgiving.”

A hadith from the prophet also describes the Earth as a purifying agent if there is a scarcity of water for washing.

Major impurity is defined in Islamic texts as occurring after sexual activity or when a woman completes her menstrual cycle.

A Muslim woman should not pray during her menstrual cycle. To purify oneself after such an impurity, a Muslim is required to take a shower, called ghusl. A person needs to wash their entire body, from head to toe, including their hair.

Spiritual actions

Preparing for prayer by washing one’s body using water can be a deeply spiritual act for Muslims. Islamic studies scholar Paul Powers argues it isn’t “empty ritualism,” but an embodied practice that helps the individual center on an inner religiosity.

Similarly, another Islamic studies scholar, Marion Katz, explains in her 2002 book Body of Text that the importance of wudu lies in its symbolic cleansing. It does not always cleanse the parts of the body that are “physically involved in the pollution act.”

Ritual purity is different from hygienic practices, although Islam also emphasizes good hygiene. Muslims take care to wash often, including using water after going to the bathroom.

Aligning with public health guidelines

In view of the coronavirus risk, Muslim leaders around the world, including in the US, have aligned their religious opinions with public health experts.

Muslim institutions have begun to recommend that people make sure to wash their hands for 20 seconds with soap before doing wudu. Emphasizing that wudu alone cannot prevent the virus from spreading, other Islamic institutions recommend that mosques supply extra soap and hand sanitizer near the washing area.

They have issued rulings to cancel Friday prayers, urged Muslims to wash their hands with soap regularly, refrain from touching their face and practice social distancing.

While people have cleared local store shelves of hand sanitizers, wipes, cleaning supplies, gloves and masks, basic hygiene practices remain the best way to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and other viruses.

At this time, Islamic practices that emphasize purity of body could help reiterate the importance of hygienic practices along with the use of soap or hand sanitizer, to reduce one’s vulnerability to the virus.

Rose S. Aslan/The Conversation

P

HOENIX—Maria Chavira, a senior administrator in the Diocese of Phoenix, says Spanish-speaking Catholic parishes in her area are “bursting at the seams” and celebrates the emergence of Hispanics as the largest ethnic component of the church nationwide.

Throughout the Southwest, where the surge has been dramatic, Roman Catholic leaders are excited by the possibilities—and well aware of daunting challenges.

Hispanics now account for 40 percent of all US Catholics, and a solid majority of school-age Catholics. Yet,, Hispanic Americans are strikingly underrepresented in Catholic schools and in the priesthood—accounting for less than 19 percent of Catholic school enrollment and only about 3 percent of US-based priests.

In the Phoenix diocese, there are than 700,000 Hispanics out of a total of 1.2 million Catholics.

Yet, out of more than 200 priests, Catholic researchers counted only seven American-born Hispanics.

Extensive efforts are under way to narrow the demographic gaps.

They have been highlighted in a nearly completed four-year study

by US Catholic bishops seeking to strengthen the church’s engagement with Hispanics. ”We have a lot of opportunities,” said Chavira, who oversees the Hispanic Mission Office and other departments in the Phoenix diocese.

“There may be a little turbulence ahead, but we’re going to make it.”

Chavira is among more than two dozen Catholic leaders and activists who shared their thoughts about the Hispanic Catholic phenomenon with The Associated Press, some in telephone interviews and others face-to-face during a reporting trip to Arizona and Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.

Evidence of the change can be seen each December, when

A priest marks ashes on the foreheads of students from the St. John Paul II Catholic High School during Ash Wednesday Mass at the St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Phoenix, Arizona, on February 26. AP/Dario Lopez-Mills

thousands of Hispanic Catholics dance and march in downtown Phoenix to celebrate Our Lady of Guadalupe. It can be seen in fast-grow ing, heav ily Hispanic communities in Phoenix’s western suburbs.

Nationwide, more than 1,200 Catholic schools have closed in the past decade, usually under financial stress. Yet, in the suburb of Avondale, enrollment is surging at a handsome new Catholic high school.

The school, named for Pope John Paul II, opened in 2018.

About 70 percent of its 220 students are Hispanic; plans call for rapid expansion to accommodate an enrollment of 1,000.

“We’re serving people who’ve been underserved in this nation,” said the principal, Sister Mary Jordan Hoover. “These young people are trying to learn to be the next teachers, the next administrators, writers, doctors. They‘re dreaming big.”

The hopefulness contrasts with circumstances in some other regions. Hundreds of parishes have closed in the Northeast and Midwest. The clergy sex-abuse scandal has forced more than 20 dioceses across the US into bankruptcy since 2004, most recently in the Northeast.

The scandals haven’t spared the Southwest. The dioceses in Tucson,

Arizona, and in Santa Fe and Gallup, New Mexico, are among those that declared bankruptcy.

But in states along the Mexico border, past scandals don’t diminish the excitement over a future Hispanic-accented Catholic Church. More than 400 new parishes have opened since 1970 in the border states, and many Hispanic Catholics were elated by the recent election of Mexican-born Los Angeles Archbishop José Gómez as the first Hispanic president of the bishops’ conference.

“It’s the tale of two churches,” said Hosffman Ospino, a professor of Hispanic ministry at Boston College. “In Boston, I see a Catholicism that’s very reserved.

In the Southwest it’s very public, very expressive.”

A major challenge for the Catholic hierarchy: persuading more Hispanic young men to become priests.

An example of that challenge: 30-year-old Diego Piña Lopez of Tucson. He’s devoted his life to the Catholic tenet of supporting the dignity of all people, including asylum seekers who visit Casa Alitas, the Catholic-run shelter in Tucson where he works.

Growing up, he sometimes considered becoming a priest, but opted instead to pursue graduate degrees in social work and public health. Why not the priesthood? “I

Roy Lagarde/CBCP News

wanted to have a family,” he said.

By the latest count of the bishops’ conference, there are about 37,300 US-based priests. Among them are roughly 3,000 Hispanics—more than 2,000 of them foreign-born.

One problem, said Ospino, is that Hispanics in the US have lagged behind other groups in regard to college-level education, limiting the pool of young men qualified for seminary.

But even as the second and third generations of many Hispanic immigrant families do pursue higher education, other factors are at play.

“With those generations, there’s extremely heavy pressure to think more about economic success than the glory of God,” said Daniel Flores, bishop of Brownsville, Texas. “We need to teach them the concept of service, rather than you need to earn as much as you can.”

Overall enrollment in Catholic schools in the US has plummeted in recent decades, from more than 5.2 million in the 1960s to about 1.73 million this year. Of the current students, only 18.5 percent are Hispanic.

Experts cite several reasons.

Many Hispanics in the US come from Latin American countries where private schools, including Catholic ones, are viewed as bastions of the wealthy.

With tuition averaging more than $5,000 for elementary grades and $10,000 for high school, Catholic education in the US seems unaffordable to many families.

And many Catholic schools are losing students to charter schools which are able to access government funds for their operations.

All these factors are present in the Brownsville, diocese, where Catholic school enrollment has dropped sharply in recent years in the face of tougher competition from charter and public schools. AP

Biodiversity Sunday BusinessMirror

Asean Champions of Biodiversity Media Category 2014

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Editor: Lyn Resurreccion

Climate push loses momentum as the world fights coronavirus

E

u r o p e a n Central Bank President Christine Lagarde once spent more time talking about climate change than inflation. It happened during a news conference in Frankfurt less than two months ago, but already feels like something from another century—or planet.

In the days since, the novel coronavirus and an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia have rocked financial markets and brought the world to the brink of an economic crisis.

Understandably, these two extraordinary events have grabbed global attention. Yet, the trickle of concerning climate news has not slowed.

A new study published last week in Nature Communications suggested tipping points—irreversible changes that could reshape ecosystems, such as forests and coral reefs—may happen sooner than previously thought.

The World Meteorological Organization also warned that about 22 million people were displaced by extreme weather in 2019, up from 17.2 million the year before.

The United Nations won’t hold any faceto-face climate-change talks until at least the end of April, as part of the effort to contain the coronavirus, according to Climate Change News.

An EU-China climate summit due to take place at the end of the month has also been postponed.

Such events are essential for governments to draft agreements in advance of the UN’s next global climate meeting, scheduled to take place in Glasgow in November.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP26) is particularly critical, as all signatories are supposed to present even more ambitious plans to cut greenhouse-gas emissions than called for

under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

S o far, only the Marshall Islands, Suriname, Nor way and Moldova have presented such plans, according to the World Resources Institute.

The climate policy push is at risk of stalling on a national level as, well. The UK scaled back plans to put environment at the center of its budget last week.

Spain, which has made climate change a central part of its political agenda, halted all legislative activity for at least two weeks and declared a state of emergency over the weekend.

Despite the temporary setbacks, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last week that the European Union remains committed to its Green Deal, a moonshot plan to make the bloc carbon neutral by 2050.

“Cl e a r l y we c a n n o t i g n o re w h at ’s going on globally,” said EU Environment Co m m i s s i o n e r Vi rg i n i j u s S i n ke v i c i u s on Bloomberg TV. The global “climate emergency didn’t go anywhere.”

But transforming the economy is a titanic effort, requiring all the pieces to move in perfect coordination over an extended period of time.

Until now, public policy and private investment have pushed each other to advance climate goals. Whether all the stakeholders involved can deal with the immediate shocks while keeping long-term goals in sight remains to be seen.

“Now we have coronavirus and every three or four years there will be a significant shock that governments will need to focus on over the short term,” said John Ferguson, director of macroeconomics at the Economist Intelligence Unit. “It’s no one’s fault, but that can throw certain countries off course. Let’s remember this is a goal about 2050.” Bloomberg News

As virus shuts down cities in Europe, pollution drops

B

ERLIN—The European Union’s space agency‘s Earth-observation satellites have detected a significant reduction in the pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a byproduct of the use of diesel motors and other human activities, in northern Italy as the advance of the Covid-19 has led to drastic measures curtailing ordinary life.

The agency’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Ser vice repor ted last week that with the “abrupt changes in activity levels” in northern Italy, it has tracked a “reduction trend” of NO2 for the last four to five weeks.

So far, Italy has been the hardest hit country in Europe by the new coronavirus, and the government has implemented a wide lockdown, encouraging its 62 million people to stay home unless it’s absolutely

necessary to go out.

Similar drops in pollutants were detected in China after the government there implemented widespread shutdowns to try and slow the spread of Covid-19.

NO2 is a short-lived pollutant, staying in the atmosphere generally less than a day before being deposited or reacting with other gases, meaning it remains fairly close to where it was emitted, the agency said.

Most emissions are generated by human activities—such as traffic, energy production, residential heating and industry.

“It is quite remarkable that a signal of decreasing activity levels could be detected,” said Vincent-Henri Peuch, the director of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. “This shows the extent of the measures taken by Italy.” AP

A7

Virus jolts China to curb animal trade before hosting UN summit

T

he deadly coronavirus that has infected more than 80,000 people in China could push the government to boost protection for animals and plants before it hosts the United Nations’ biennial conference on global biodiversity in October.

China is scheduled to hold the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in the southwest city of Kunming against a background of a global epidemic that probably originated from bats and was transmitted to humans via wild animals.

The outbreak has sparked public criticism over loopholes in laws designed to preserve the nation’s wildlife, with environment groups, government institutions, university professors and even state media demanding tougher restrictions on the widespread trade in wild animals.

As the number of infections from the coronavirus exploded in January and February in the city of Wuhan, the outbreak was linked to a meat, fish and vegetable market in the city that sold everything from peacocks to hedgehogs.

A third of the early 2019 novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19) cases were later found to have no traceable connection to the market, but scientists and officials believe the virus did jump to humans from animals, and the consumption of wild meat remains the No. 1 culprit for the public health crisis.

The government took drastic measures as thousands quickly sickened in the province, bringing large sections of the economy and transportation networks almost to a halt to slow the spread of the disease.

The crisis could slash economic growth to as low as 3.4 percent this year, the slowest since 1990, according to the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance.

While the government’s priority is to contain the epidemic and get the country back on its feet, it will face increasing criticism over the trade in exotic meats that have been known to pose health risks since the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002.

In an online survey in February of 100,000 people in China, about 12 percent said they had consumed wild-animal products and almost all of those said they will no longer do it.

Nine out of 10 said China should ban exhibiting wild animals in public except in zoos. Many said they had never paid attention to wildlife issues until the coronavirus.

“The virus has made people realize that their health and well-being are closely related to the well-being of wild animals and the health of biodiversity,” said Prof. Jiang Jinsong at Tsinghua University’s department of History of Science. “Economic loss and heath damage touch everybody.”

China is 1 of 17 “megadiverse countries,” according to Conservation International and the UN, harboring nearly 10 percent of all plant species and 14 percent of animals.

But decades of urbanization and development have tainted the land and eroded habitats.

Some 90 percent of China’s grasslands and 40 percent of its major wetlands are being degraded, according to the Environment Ministry. About 11 percent of the nation’s major flora and 21 percent of its vertebrates are threatened.

The 1988 Wildlife Protection Law protects animals—such as pandas and snow leopards—that have value to “ecology, science and society.”

While it was amended in 2016 to provide extra protection for some habitats and other issues, more than a third of China’s mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles still aren’t covered, according to Beijing-based Shan Shui Conservation Centre.

Among them are the nation’s 130 types of bats.

For decades the government prioritized growth and the environment took a back seat. That began to change in the past few years as the cost to

Geese sit wrapped in bags outside a market in the Luohu district of Shenzhen, China, on December 20, 2013. Brent Lewin/Bloomberg

health of years of rampant pollution began to take its toll.

President Xi Jinping called for an “ecological civilization,” but Environment Minister Li Ganjie said last year that, while some progress has been made, “conflicts between biodiversity protection and economic development exist,” and the outlook is not optimistic.

Farming of “wild” animals is now big business. More than 14 million people were employed in 2016 in the industry, which had 520 billion yuan ($74 billion) in sales.

The Chinese Academy of Engineering described it in a 2017 report as “one of China’s most vibrant industries.”

The coronavirus may change that.

In late February, the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s top legislature, announced a ban on eating all terrestrial wild animals, wildcaught or farmed.

It’s a first step toward eradicating the trade altogether but may not be enough to get a total ban included in the Wildlife Protection Law, which the NPC is due to begin revising this year.

“It doesn’t touch the more complicated issues of how to regulate use of animals for medicine, fashion and entertainment,” said Li Shuo, policy adviser at Greenpeace China.

Traditional Chinese Medicine widely uses exotic animal parts— such as pangolin scales and deer antlers—that are considered to have unique benefits.

And many people believe that wild meat provides advantages for health and vitality that are absent in farmed animals.

Even the definition of “wild” is complicated. Local authorities often

provide special licenses for farmers to breed animals for sale that are normally only found in the wild. That allows unscrupulous traders to pass off wild-caught game as farm-bred in markets.

Nine conservation institutions and organizations jointly submitted suggested amendments to the Wildlife Protection Law to the NPC, including a fundamental change to the language of the legislation.

“For a long time, wild animals have been seen as a resource to use, so different protection categories are made depending on their economic value,” the groups wrote. “This way of thinking no longer suits today’s ecology protection principles.”

Conservationists hope the hosting of the UN conference in Kunming, together with a public awakening of the hazards due to the spread of the coronavirus, will jolt China to the forefront of conservation by brokering a new global biodiversity framework—an ecological equivalent to the UN climate-change framework agreed in Paris in 2015.

It won’t be easy. The biodiversity conference 10 years ago in Aichi, Japan, set 20 goals to be achieved by now, including for water conservation and pollution abatement.

Most haven’t been met.

According to the WWF, the world’s population of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians declined by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014.

A UN report last year said the rate of extinction is accelerating.

“Progress in wildlife protection could be a highlight for China’s work as the host country this year,” said Greenpeace’s Li. Bloomberg News

In contrast to Rickards’s view, Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, wrote that “scientists were expecting the count to be down slightly, but this level of decrease is heartbreaking.”

“More protections are clearly needed for this migratory wonder and its habitat,” Curry wrote.

Environmentalist and author Homero Aridjis said that “the decline of over 53 percent of populations in

the butterfly reserve is worrisome, above all because of the effects of climate change on the migration route and on the wintering grounds in Mexico.”

Aridjis said crime and deforestation in Mexico is also a cause for alarm. One butterfly activist and a part-time guide in the reserve were murdered earlier this year.

Last year’s numbers were the biggest since the 2006-2007 season. Two years ago, the butterflies covered 2.48 hectares (6.12 acres), similar to this year’s numbers.

The butterf lies hit a low of just 0.67 hectares (1.66 acres) in 2013-2014.

Mexico has made some strides against illegal logging in the reserve, but Aridjis said it remains a problem in some areas. Butterflies depend on health tree canopy to protect them from rain and cold.

Some scientists said the approximately 6-hectare (15-acre) coverage of a year ago should be seen as a minimum for the viability of the migrating monarchs in the future.

Loss of habitat, especially the milkweed where the monarchs lay their eg gs, pesticide and herbicide use, as well climate change, all pose threats to the species’ migration. AP

Asean training on biodiversity info-sharing tool turns online Monarch butterflies drop 53% in Mexico wintering area

T

he Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD) and the Asean Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) will conduct a three-day online training on the use of the Bioland tool, an online platform designed to help parties to the CBD in the curation and sharing of biodiversity data.

The webinar, which will run from March 25 to 27, serves as a preliminary activity to the “Regional Workshop for the Asia on National Clearing-House Mechanisms.” It was originally slated from March 8 to 12 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but was postponed due to growing concerns on the spread of the coronavirus disease or Covid-19.

In the two-step webinar, the SCBD oriented the Biodiversit y Information Management staff of the ACB on how to use the platform from March 11 to 13. The ACB team will then train the information technology and technical staff from each Asean member-state (AMS).

The training was designed to address technical barriers faced by the AMS in effectively establishing their respective national Clearing-House Mechanism (CHM) web sites, which would be part of the global network with the CBD web site serving as a central node.

The CHM of the CBD was established to facilitate scientific and technical cooperation and sharing of biodiversity information among governments, toward the successful implementation of national biodiversity strategies and plans, which will eventually contribute to the achievement of global biodiversity targets.

“As parties to the CBD, the AMS are encouraged to establish and maintain their national CHMs that will serve as a

rich biodiversity information resource in their respective countries,” said Dr. Sheila G. Vergara, director of the Biodiversity Information Management unit of the ACB. The Bioland tool, which the parties to the CBD and its secretariat have developed, is a user-friendly portal that provides templates for uploading various content to a national CHM. It is customizable to meet its user’s specific needs.

“In the region, we have the Asean CHM, which provides a wide range of services, information, capacity-building guides, and tools to support the AMS in conservation planning, monitoring and science-based decision-making,” Vergara said.

Some of Asean CHM’s features are the species database, invasive alien species database, information on the Asean Heritage Parks and an e-library.

She said the ACB is working with the Scientific Advisory Committee of ACB to develop a roster of biodiversity experts.

This database will make it easier to locate and identify individuals and institutions sharing a common interest in biodiversity conservation, as well as scientists, researchers and biodiversity experts in the Asean region.

Alexandre Rafalovitch, information systems officer of the Secretariat of the CBD, will ser ve as the main resource speaker of the training with support from the biodiversity information management team of the ACB. The ACB was established in 2005 by the AMS as a response to biodiversity loss in the region. It supports and coordinates activities in the Asean, leading to the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity for the benefit of the region and the AMS.

M

EXICO CITY—The number of monarch butterflies that showed up at their winter resting grounds decreased about 53 percent this year, Mexican officials said last week.

Some activists called the decline “heartbreaking,” but the Mexico head of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said the reduction “is not alarming.”

WWF Mexico Director Jorge Rickards said the previous year’s large numbers were “atypical” and the monarchs had returned to their average population levels of recent years.

The government’s commission for natural protected areas said the butterflies’ population was “stable,” even though they covered only 2.8 hectares (6.9 acres) this year.

That was down from 6.05 hectares (14.95 acres) the previous year.

Because the monarchs cluster so densely in pine and fir trees, it is easier to count them by area rather than by individuals.

“During the most recent wintering season the norm has been for the butterflies to cover an average of about 3 hectares,” Rickards said.

“The last season, 2018-19, was very good, with 6.05 hectares of forest cover, but it was certainly atypical, thanks to the fact that the first generation of butterflies in the

Monarch butterflies cling to branches in their winter nesting grounds in El Rosario Sanctuary, near Ocampo, Michoacan state, Mexico, on January 31. AP/Rebecca Blackwell

spring of 2018 encountered favorable weather conditions to reproduce,” he said.

In contrast, butterflies in the spring of 2019 encountered colder weather in Texas than the previous year, and thus were less able to reproduce.

Millions of monarchs migrate from the United States and Canada each year to pine and fir forests west of Mexico’s capital.

A8 Sunday, March 22, 2020

By Stephen Wade

T

The Associated Press

OKYO—The torch relay was not always a fixture of the modern Olympics, which began in 1896.

The relay tradition started at Adolph Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics—the Games of the XI Olympiad—and was the brainchild of Carl Diem, who was the head of the organizing committee.

The Tokyo Olympic relay was scheduled to begin its Japan leg last Friday in northeastern Fukushima prefecture.

Tony Perrottet, in his 2004 book The Naked Olympics—published to coincide with the 2004 Athens Olympics—captured the paradox of the Nazi regime appropriating the relay.

“Ironically, considering its repellent origins, the torch race has come to symbolize international brotherhood today, and remains a centerpiece of our own pomp-filled Olympic opening ceremonies,” Perrottet wrote.

He added: “The Nazis knew a good propaganda symbol when they saw one.”

Perrottet recounts how the Olympic flame was run from Greece to Germany over 12 days, ending with the lighting of a “colossal brazier in the Berlin stadium before the Führer’s approving gaze.” Each of the torches carried the logo of German arms manufacturer Krupp, Perrottet wrote.

The first person to set off on July 20, 1936, was Greek athlete Konstantin Kondylis. The torch meandered through Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany with each runner covering a kilometer.

Perrottet wrote that Hitler admired the images of Greek gods and goddesses and wanted the Olympics to promote his idea of the supremacy, the perfection, of the German nation.

“Hitler took considerable personal interest in the ritual, and pumped funds into its promotion: The Nazi propaganda machine covered the torch relay slavishly, broadcast radio reports from every step of the route, and filled the Games with the iconography of ancient Greek athletics.”

The first Olympic flame appeared at the 1928

Sports BusinessMirror

Editor: Jun Lomibao | mirror_sports@yahoo.com.ph

TORCH RELAY TRACED TO HITLER’S OLYMPICS Amsterdam Games, and then again in 1932 in Los Angeles.

“Very little is known about the 1928 and 1932 flames, but they were lit on site and not at Olympia,” Dr. Bill Mallon, a former president of the International Society of Olympic Historians, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

There was no relay until 1936, and it’s been continuous since then. The Olympics were canceled during World War II (Tokyo was to hold the 1940 Games) and resumed in London in 1948. There have been modifications along the way.

The flame for the Summer Olympics has always been lit in Ancient Olympia, Greece, but Winter Olympic torches have not always been lit there. For the 1952 and 1960 Winter Olympics, it was lit in Morgedal, Norway. For the 1956 Winter Games, it was lit in Rome.

More recently, for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the torch was lit in Greece and a second torch was lit in Norway.

Having two flame origins did not please the tradition-steeped Greeks.

The relay was “commercialized” at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics when relay sponsor AT&T sold “kilometer legs” of the event to allow people to run with the torch. Coca-Cola became the sponsor in Barcelona in 1992.

“Greece was not happy with that in 1984 and threatened to not let Los Angeles light their flame in Olympia,” Mallon wrote. “It was enough of a problem that Peter Ueberroth [chairman of the organizing committee] and Juan Antonio

AN athlete lights the urn for the Berlin Olympics in Lustgarten as members of the Hitler Youth stand at attention on August 1, 1936. AP

Samaranch [IOC president] actually made contingency plans for the relay in case the Greeks held to their threat. They eventually backed off and the flame was lit in Ancient Olympia in 1984.”

The 2008 Beijing Olympic torch relay ran into trouble, as well. The Chinese relay, in addition to a domestic route, also circled

the globe. It was targeted along the way by anti-China and pro-Tibet protests at half the stops. Taiwan also boycotted the relay when China wanted to include it on its domestic route—implying Chinese sovereignty over the self-governing island.

China’s authoritarian government has viewed Taiwan as a renegade province since

the two separated in the 1949 civil war. Taiwan, which is also known as the Republic of China, governs itself as an independent state.

The chaos at the time led IOC President Jacques Rogge to say the Olympics and the relay were in “crisis.” After the Beijing Olympics ended, the IOC did away with the international portion of the relay.

Through wars and world turmoil, Kentucky Derby runs on

T

PANAHON1

HE Great Depression and World War I and World War II didn’t stop the Kentucky Derby, a race that has been run without interruption since it began in 1875.

But for the first time in 75 years, it will miss the month of May. Churchill Downs postponed the opening leg of the Triple Crown from May 2 to September 5, due to concern over the coronavirus pandemic that has wreaked havoc with the world’s sports calendar.

“At no point did we ever consider canceling the Kentucky Derby,” said Bill Carstanjen, CEO of Churchill Downs Inc. In 1945, the track in Louisville, Kentucky, almost didn’t have a choice. That year the race for three-year-old colts was staged over a month past its traditional date on the spring calendar.

That January, horse racing was banned nationwide. Jimmy Byrnes, director of the Office of War Mobilization in Washington, viewed it as a waste of valuable resources.

Men that could be serving in the war instead

were working in track operations, gambling on racing was hugely popular, and gas and tire rubber was being consumed heavily in transporting horses to tracks.

In late January, US troops in Europe had just concluded the Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest fought by them in the war. Still to come in the Pacific was Iwo Jima, an equally fierce and bloody battle in which the Allies defeated Japanese forces at the end of March. An Allied victory loomed, but was not yet assured.

Not until Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, was the ban on racing was lifted. That led to the Derby being run on June 9.

The recent end of the war still kept many people from traveling long distances to Louisville. However, about 75,000 people attended and wagered a Derby day record of $2,380,796, including a record $776,408 on the Derby itself. Ridden by future Hall of Famer Eddie Arcaro, Hoop Jr. won by six lengths against 15 rivals over a muddy track.

The Derby was in peril another time, too.

Byrnes had come close to banning the sport in 1943, however, racing powers prevailed in keeping it going.

That year, there were travel restrictions imposed by World War II and no out-of-town tickets were sold. Still, the Derby endured, with Count Fleet winning in front of 65,000. He went on to win the Triple Crown that year, sweeping the Derby, Preakness and Belmont stakes.

The only other Derby not run in May came in 1901, when it occurred on April 29. His Eminence led all the way in defeating four rivals.

This year’s postponement will require changes to the points system used to decide the 20-horse field for the Derby. More qualifying races at tracks around the country will be added this summer.

Trainers will need to adjust training and racing schedules for their hopefuls.

“I’m going to have to back off some of them that are ready to go right now,” said four-time Derby-winning trainer Bob Baffert, who has a handful of top prospects. “The thing is to keep them healthy.” AP

Soccer’s paralysis sparks questions about player contracts

I

T was the dream scenario for David Silva at the end of his trophy-filled, decade-long career at Manchester City.

Picture it: “El Mago” (the Magician), as fans fondly refer to perhaps the club’s greatest player, holding aloft the Champions League trophy—the big piece of silverware to elude him and his team—after his final game for City. What a way to go.

The rapidly spreading coronavirus might have put an end to those hopes.

Silva is among dozens of English Premier League players, and hundreds of players across Europe, whose contracts are due to expire at the end of this season. June 30, to be specific.

Except the suspension of the Premier League—and almost every other domestic league across the globe—and the uncertainty over when they will resume means there’s no knowing when the 2019-20 soccer season will actually end. It might not even be in 2020.

It means one of the most significant questions during soccer’s current paralysis is how the sport deals with players whose contracts are about to expire.

Will Silva, for example, even be at City when this season ends, if it ever does?

“As with every section of society, there is a sense of great uncertainty about what’s to come,” said James Skelland, a football agent at YMU Sport.

As part of its effort to find some solutions amid a virus outbreak that has plunged soccer into one of its biggest crises, Fifa is creating

THERE’S no knowing when the 2019-2020 soccer season will actually end—it might not even be in 2020. AP

a working group to assess any “necessary amendments or temporary dispensations” to rules regarding the status of players and the transfer window which reopens on July 1.

Any emergency measures will aim “to protect contracts for both players and clubs and adjusting player registration periods,” Fifa said.

On Tuesday, soon after pushing back the European Championship from mid-2020 to mid-2021, UEFA—European soccer’s leadership—announced a working group to examine the fallout of soccer’s current suspension. Player contracts will surely be among the topics.

The talks will not be straightforward, with Skelland describing it as a “very complicated situation.”

Most soccer seasons in Europe run from July 1 to June 30. Some northern countries have leagues run from April into November to

avoid severe winter weather.

Employment agreements between players and clubs (including loans), broadcasting agreements and sponsorship contracts follow those dates. This is the first time the season is likely to over-run.

UEFA expressed its commitment to completing the domestic and European club competitions (the Champions League and the Europa League) by June 30. That target is based mostly on hope, with soccer at the mercy of an invisible threat that has infected more than 218,000 people worldwide and killed more than 8,800.

The issue facing clubs is what to do with players whose contracts expire on June 30, or even earlier in the case of loan signings.

Sven Demeulemeester, the founder of Belgium-based sports law firm Atfield, said players hold the the power. AP