The Employees Compensation Commission (ECC) has already released more or less P4 million as cash assistance to the employed sector in Western Visayas who got infected by the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) from 2021 up to the present.
Regional officer Stephen Barredo, in a media briefing yesterday, said Covid-19 has been declared by the Department of Labor and Employment and their ECC as an occupational illness.
“The cash assistance benefit is given to workers who contracted Covid-19 while working. The good thing about Covid-19, [is that] we are not very strict. We are just asking you to provide a certificate of employment with the last day of duty prior to contracting the illness to prove the work-relatedness of Covid-19,” he said.
ECC released cash assistance to 10 recipients yesterday, bringing to 400 the number of claimants from Western Visayas out of the 514 walk-in applicants.
The assistance varies from P10,000 for survivors and P15,000 for those who died.
“The cash assistance is just an additional benefit. They have received sickness benefits, medical benefits and reimbursements, and other funeral benefits. That is over and above the SSS [Social Security System] and GSIS [Government Service Insurance System] employee basic compensation claims,” Barredo added.
The filing claim for the cash assistance has no prescriptive period since the country is under a state of calamity.
Currently, he added that they are no longer accepting walk-in applicants and instead have the cash assistance online application system, which is currently on hold for the ECC to focus on processing the claims of pending applications.
Meanwhile, ECC will pilot the Return to Work Assistance Program (RTWAP) in Western Visayas in the second quarter of 2023.
Regional program focal person Mark Lester Flores, in the same press briefing, said that RTWAP is aimed at bringing back persons with work-related disabilities to the mainstream by rehiring them either from their same or different employer.
“We are dealing with them holistically from the time they incur injuries or accidents up to the time that they go back to employment. If not, we can provide them with other benefits such as livelihood assistance.
“The success of the RTWAP mainly depends on how early we assist our clients,” he said. (PNA)