Cebu City Health ceases release of COVID-19 info

This is the statement of the IATF with regards to the harmonizing of data between the DOH and the Cebu City Health Department.

CEBU CITY, Philippines — Cebu City Health Department (CCHD) will no longer post the number of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases on their Facebook page as mandated by the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF).

In an advisory, the CCHD said that they had been advised by the IATF to cease the publishing of the cases until their data had been harmonized with that of the Department of Health (DOH).

“We will no longer be posting daily reports on our page for the Cebu City COVID-19 Monitoring. This was recommended by the IATF to avoid confusion with the public as we are still harmonizing data with other health departments,” said CCHD.

The city’s health department said that the cases they post daily are actual cases validated by the contact tracing teams, but this may have caused confusion to the public.

They urged the residents to check the postings of Regional DOH in Central Visayas (DOH-7) for updates on the cases in the city.

Recently, DOH-7 has asked the LGUs to publish data that have been verified by the Regional Epidemiology Surveillance Unit (RESU) and avoid publishing raw data.

DOH-7 said the raw data were only for contact tracing, not for public consumption.

Read more: Cebu City breaches 6K mark in COVID-19 cases on July 5

There were discrepancies in the reported cases of the city that have reached 620 cases on July 5 when DOH-7 released the number of cases in the city to be actually 6,761, far from the reported number by the CCHD, which is 6,141

This prompted the DOH-7 to harmonize the data released by the agency and of the LGU.

Health Secretary Francisco Duque, III, recently instructed the health agencies to harmonize their data and release only validated information. /dbs