JUNE 16 — Yesterday, Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin announced a four-phase Covid-19 recovery plan. Since the pandemic hit our shores and the first movement control order (MCO) was enforced on March 18 last year, this is the first time the government has come up with an exit strategy in tackling the coronavirus.
For the business community, this provides some clarity after over a year of uncertainty over how we plan to wriggle ourselves out of this public health-cum-economic crisis. Ever since the first MCO, we were groping in the dark over how to walk the lives-livelihood tightrope.
On the one hand, we understood why restrictions that were harmful to businesses were imposed, like no dining-in or close-contact economic sectors like pubs had to be shuttered. On the other hand, there’s only so much burden businesses could shoulder before bottomline realities set in.
To make things worse, the uncertainties over how much longer we had to put up with the economically-choking restrictions and what kind of new SOPs would be rolled out, made all manner of business planning an exercise in futility.
But yesterday, the government finally unveiled milestones that need to be achieved before certain restrictions are lifted. For example, Phase II will kick in when daily new infections dip below 4,000 cases and the country’s vaccination rate reaches 10 per cent.
Under Phase II, more economic sectors will be opened and 80 per cent of the workforce will be allowed on site. According to the announcement yesterday, social sectors will remain closed while the ban on inter-state travel stays.
While the business community would prefer the social sectors to reopen and the ban on inter-state travel lifted, the government, by announcing the conditions early, had given the business community the comfort and confidence to make medium and long-term plans — something which many of us had been unable to do before this.
For example, we can now plan weeks or months ahead in anticipation of whether or not restrictions will be lifted or worse, whether tighter ones will kick in, based on the daily infection numbers and hospital beds capacity.
With the Covid-19 National Immunisation Plan (NIP) picking up pace, having reached as high as 200,000 doses a day, we can expect the daily new infections to not just dip, but to drop at an increasing speed. As it is, the country’s R naught had fallen below the critical 1.0 rate earlier this week.
This, together with the certainty and clarity elucidated in the recovery plan, businesses can now look forward to a slow, but eventual return to the pre-pandemic days which we all hankered after.
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
