DOH: No more COVID-19 test results backlog

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) tests are seen in a laboratory at the CHIREC Delta Hospital in Brussels, Belgium August 11, 2020. Picture taken August 11, 2020. | REUTERS/Yves Herman

MANILA, Philippines— The Department of Health (DOH) on Monday announced that it has already cleared its backlog of coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19) test results for validation.

In an interview on ABS-CBN News Channel, DOH Undersecretary and spokesperson Ma. Rosario Vergeire said the health department can now validate and report new cases submitted within a day.

“For now, if you would see, we do not have any validation backlog anymore because within 24 hours of the data being submitted to us, we immediately validate and we are able to bring it out and report it at once the following day,” Vergeire said.

An analysis by an investigative group from ABS-CBN showed a total of 4,377 duplicate cases were taken out from the COVID-19 data from June to August.

Vergeire said duplicates were found thanks to the DOH’s data management unit dedicated in validating the cases being reported to the agency.

“These 4,000 cases that were found to be duplicates, this is a result of our validation process. This was not a one-time reporting. This happened in a span of two months. Because we are now able to better clean our data since we’ve started creating this data management unit in the DOH,” she explained.

Earlier, the DOH had classification of reported cases as either “fresh” or “late.”

Fresh cases refer to those that were validated in the past three days while late cases refer to those that were recorded at least four days ago but have just been validated.

The Philippines has so far recorded 189,601 COVID-19 cases with 2,998 deaths and 131,367 recoveries.