BAGUIO City Representative Mark Go is seeing gradual opening of businesses in the country’s Summer Capital when it transitions into the new normal after the enhanced community quarantine .
“Primarily, the opening of businesses in Baguio City should be done on a staggered basis following a road map and not to be done drastically. It should also follow the requirements for what we should start to call as a new normal by practicing physical distancing and the protocols in preventing infection from the coronavirus,” Go said.
With Luzon under ECQ since March, the city government estimated some P1.4 billion worth of revenue loss in tourism due to the coronavirus disease with the tourism sector taking the biggest hit since the viral pandemic.Go admitted that with the Luzon-wide implementation of ECQ, the tourism sector was the hardest hit by the pandemic affecting thousands of workers from the industry.
The city government earlier laid out plans for the recovery phase as it expects to normalize business operations by September. “For schools, we have to leverage the use of technology particularly connectivity not only at schools but even in offices. Telcos should start improving their internet signals. Aside from this, we will also ask the telcos to give big discounts from them particularly for teachers and students for their charges in the use of data probably at 50% especially during this duration,” the lawmaker stated.