Governor rolls out short-term stimulus package for Puerto Rico

On Monday, Governor Wanda Vásquez Garced outlined her administration’s new short-term stimulus package, designed to mitigate the economic harm caused by the COVID-19 outbreak as it continues to upend life in Puerto Rico. The relief package has a price tag of $787 million and goes into effect immediately. The government of Puerto Rico has confirmed 31 positive cases of COVID-19, and at least 310 people may already have contracted the virus. As of this writing, there have been 2 fatalities on the Island.

Below are some of the key elements of the package:

• Ensures that central government employees will continue to be paid, and efforts are being made to ensure the same for municipal government employees. 
• Suspends for three months several sales and use taxes and related penalties.
• Increases unemployment benefits, and relaxes eligibility rules to include self-employed workers and some part-time workers.   
• Forbids utilities from suspending services due to non-payment. 
• Provides $500 subsidies for self-employed individuals, and $1,500 for small businesses. 
• Pushes back the deadline for paying taxes to July 15. 
• Provides bonuses for nurses, medical technicians, law enforcement and first responders. 
• Allows people to obtain 90-day moratoriums on loan, mortgage, and credit card payments from their banks or credit unions. 

The stimulus package has been approved by the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB), and the governor thanked its members for their assistance.

Governor Vásquez Garced pointed out that this was only a first step, and that efforts were underway to provide relief for key industries such as tourism. 

Exodus of medical professionals leaves Puerto Rico unprepared for COVID-19 worst-case scenarios

Puerto Rico has been losing medical professionals for more than half a decade, with 14,000 medical professionals having left in the last five years. Now, as coronavirus continues to spread across Puerto Rico, experts worry that doctors may be eventually overwhelmed by the disease, with more sick people than can be treated. 

“We’re at the borderline, or below the amount of medical personnel we need [to attend to a possible crisis],” said Dr. Elba Díaz Toro, of the Puerto Rican government’s Coronavirus taskforce, to El Nuevo Día. She estimates that, given the number of medical professionals currently on the Island, the situation will only be manageable if the contagion rate remains below 10% of the population (roughly 320,000 people). 

Community leaders in Vieques and Culebra call on governor to ban tourists 

Tourism has for decades played a vital role in shaping the economic fortunes of the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra. Now, with COVID-19 spreading across the world, residents from both islands fear tourists may also bring about yet another crisis to the persistently underserved municipalities. While the arrival of tourists to Vieques and Culebra by sea has been banned for nearly a week, community leaders on both islands have called on Governor Wanda Vásquez Garced to bar their entry by air. 

Grocery store executives warn of potential food shortages

While food scarcity has yet to be a significant consequence of the crisis caused by COVID-19 in Puerto Rico, that is not likely to remain the case, according to insiders of the island’s grocery stores and their supply mechanisms. If demand for supermarket products continues increasing at its current rate and the coronavirus crisis does not abate, then it is possible that grocery stores will begin having problems supplying that demand in some four or five weeks. 

“The reality is that right now product is arriving without issue,” said Eduardo Marxuach, president of Supermercados Econo. “But if several states make the decision to close down, like California did, and if drops in the number of employees [who can no longer work because they are sick with the coronavirus] are detected, it could be that in a month we’ll start having problems with supplies.”