January 7, 2022   The Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) is closely monitoring the impact of the elevated number of COVID-19 cases, especially in the National Capital Region (NCR) and its neighboring provinces. We estimate that the shift from Alert level 2 to Alert level 3 for NCR plus, which includes Metro Manila, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal, will result in a Gross Value Added (GVA) loss of about P3.0 billion per week. While this may delay our goal of shifting to Alert level 1, we believe that this is a temporary setback and is a necessary adjustment in view of the new COVID variant. As we previously said, we are in a better position to manage possible spikes — we have enough vaccines and funding for booster shots; we have increased hospital capacity; we now resort to granular lockdowns; and, from all indications, the Omicron variant results in less severe cases, especially to those who are fully vaccinated.  As of January 5, a total of 110.9 million doses have been rolled out. Of this, 57.3 million and 51.1 million doses were administered as the first dose and complete dose, respectively, while 2.5 million doses were administered as booster doses. Moreover, with the...