The Philippines should gradually reopen the economy and allow businesses to operate at 50 percent capacity to protect jobs, according to Teresita Sy-Coson who helps run an empire from banking to retail under SM Investments Corp.

“If all the industries can start operating 50 percent, including the transport, with all the medical precaution like making test kits more available and disinfecting measures and sanitation safeguards, then we can gradually increase the employment” after the lockdown, Sy-Coson said in an e-mailed statement.

President Rodrigo Duterte has placed the main island of Luzon, home to 60 million people and which accounts for 70 percent of the economy, on lockdown from mid-March, shuttering hundreds of businesses. Gross domestic product could shrink by as much as 1%, its first contraction in more than two decades, according to a government estimate.

Enabling establishments are important to help absorb Filipino workers returning from abroad, Sy-Coson said.

“Employment is also the key to the health of their family by having enough food for their own immunity and the key to the health of our economy,” she said.