Garbage in, garbage out

The President, in his latest late-night ramble, said he continued to trust Francisco Duque III and was convinced the Health secretary wasn’t stealing. To which the past and present presidential spokesperson “Hairy” Roque added the basis for Duque’s bonafides: the President, he said, was pals with the secretary’s brother, so there you have it. But the thing is that the main objection to Duque isn’t on the basis of honesty, but rather leadership — or the lack of it. You know as well as I do the litany of his shortcomings; the point is he exonerated Duque on the wrong charge(s).

The President’s evening TV ramble also included a pronunciamento tasking Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu with the enforcement of a re-tightening of the quarantine in Cebu City. Last June 19, Andrei Martin Diamante, an Australia-based data analytics professional, published a chart based on official data showing the continuing escalation of COVID-19 levels of infection in Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, and Metro Davao, which collectively account for 66.3 percent of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country.

He ventured an analysis: “Considering fatalities in Metro Cebu are much lower than those in Metro Manila, I’m more inclined to believe the high numbers [in Metro Cebu] is because of the aggressive testing more than the high rate of infection, but realistically it could be a combination of both phenomena… And since the largest proportion of positive cases in Metro Manila are actually of those without any city or municipality, it’s possible that Quezon City has reached the 3K mark ahead of Cebu City, just not properly reported. NCR has the highest contribution of poor data quality.”

Speaking of data, Diamante noted that, “Backlog for result validation has reached 8K for the first time, while backlog for untested samples doubled from the previous day. Reporting of late vs. fresh is more futile than ever because of these backlogs.”

The official data, when parsed by data types, continue to leave something to be desired. Yesterday, Edson Guido (who does data analytics for ABS-CBN) broke down the Department of Health’s report of 630 latest COVID-10 cases as consisting of 467 “fresh” (164 in Region 7, 149 in NCR) and 163 “late,” with 250 recoveries (that’s 240-plus for the 12th straight day, and 8,143 total), and 8 deaths (2 occurred in June, or 1,177 total). Breaking down the 630 reported cases revealed the following: Of the 468 “fresh,” all were results released 2-3 days ago (June 19-20); of the 162 “late,” 124 results were released 4-9 days ago (June 13-18), 5 on June 10-11, while 2 were before June, and 31 had missing dates!

Still on the subject of data, on June 20, the data drop of the DOH was used as the basis for CNN Philippines reporting the following COVID-19-free provinces: Quirino, Batanes, Aurora, Palawan, Masbate, Siquijor, and Guimaras. But Peter Cayton of the UP School of Statistics in Diliman took the DOH to task, as Aurora had 1 case, confirmed on June 1; Palawan had 8 cases (of which 6 were still active at the time); Siquijor had 1 case, confirmed June 16; and Zamboanga Sibugay had 1 case, confirmed June 19.

Diamante also observed on June 21 that “Announcements of DOH are completely inconsistent with the data they’re publishing. Palawan, Siquijor, and Zamboanga Sibugay have confirmed cases for a while. More confusing, Zamboanga del Norte and Surigao del Sur have cases that disappear in some dates but reappear in others.”

Which should put in context something the Palace spokesperson, the unsinkable “Hairy” Roque, said: The government’s COVID-19 testing goal is 50,000 per day (my May 20 column noted government’s own reckoning back in April 7 was that the testing range was 900 to 1,200 tests daily). The goal is itself meaningless as it is perpetually moved up without ever having been consistently met. This remark comes a day after journalist Prinz Magtulis pointed out that in the President’s report to Congress, the DOH claimed it “has been consistent that an adequate testing capacity is not measured by achieving a target number.” The fact of the matter, tweeted Magtulis, is that this claim was a lie. On June 16, according to him, citing his paper’s reports, DOH said its target was to test some 1.63 million Filipinos by July.

My May 20 column, you might remember, was on the topic of the moving target of official targets for testing. These targets kept going ever upwards, even as government consistently failed to meet its past goals, only to reward itself by announcing even higher goals.

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