THE National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) has proposed a 10-point policy plan to help the country recover from the Covid-19 pandemic and prepare for future outbreaks.

In a statement over the weekend, the NEDA said its head, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua emphasized the need to change from a pandemic to an endemic paradigm, which will enable Filipinos to learn how to live with the virus.

In a talk at the Asian Institute of Management last Wednesday, Chua said the 10-point policy agenda addresses the following topics: metrics, vaccination, healthcare capacity, economy and mobility, schooling, domestic travel, international travel, digital transformation, pandemic flexibility bill, and medium-term preparation for pandemic resilience.

The NEDA chief said that the government must adjust the primary metrics utilized for decisionmaking and being reported to the public in order to enable a move to a “endemic” mindset. Rather than total cases and deaths, he recommends focusing on total severe or critical cases, case fatality ratio, and total vaccinated.

“Similar to how we do it with the flu, we count those who are severely or critically affected, or are in the hospital, but we do not report anymore the number of mild cases,” Chua continued.

He also pointed out the importance of removing artificial barriers to vaccination, such as categorizations A1 to A5 and unnecessary form completing, and increasing immunization to children aged 12 to 17 years, and then to children aged 5 to 11 years.

Furthermore, Chua said that the continuous deployment of the alert level system as well as the expansion of public transportation capacity will be critical for the country to meet its 2021 and 2022 growth ambitions.

“We should not revert to the old way of having general quarantines.

This will enable us to achieve our growth targets and reduce the temporary increase in the unemployment and poverty rates,” he explained.

In addition, Chua advises that for fully vaccinated domestic passengers, most limitations and requirements be removed, with the exception of the vaccination

card and a single QR code for contact-tracing.

“The general idea after we addressed this new [Omicron] variant is to forego the quarantine for vaccinated passengers from green and yellow listed countries, and remove the flight or passenger daily quota,” he said.