It’s still a mistake: Sotto rejects DOH’s soft-pedalling of COVID-19 data errors

MANILA, Philippines — A mistake is a mistake.

Senate Vicente Sotto III pointed this out Wednesday after Health Secretary Francisco Duque III downplayed the discrepancies flagged by a team of experts on the agency’s data on COVID-19 patients.

The UP Resilience Institute earlier said these “alarming errors” ranged from changes in the patients’ gender to patients recorded as dead but are actually alive.

Duque said the discrepancies raised by the group were only “less than one percent” of the DOH’s data and would not affect the overall statistics or the government’s COVID-19 response.

But for Sotto, “it’s a very significant implication.”

“Kasi napakahalaga ng statistics o ng data as far as reliability (ng) scientific analysis nila. ‘Di pwedeng sabihin maliit. Maliit nga mali pa rin. Maliit o malaki, mali is mali. So kailangan ingat tayo diyan,” he told reporters in an online interview.

The Senate President said the discrepancies raised by the team of experts from UP should prompt the DOH to ensure that such “mistakes” no longer be made moving forward.

“Dapat the DOH should learn its lesson on this mistake and then make sure that our people do not commit the same mistake again because yung reliability na sinasabi, mahalagang, mahalaga para ang IATF ay makadiskarte ng tamang desisyon,” Sotto said.

“Kailangan tama yung data na nakukuha nila,” he added.

Earlier, some senators already aired their frustration over the supposed errors discovered in the DOH’s data on COVID-19 patients.

To date, the DOH has confirmed 11,618 COVID-19 cases in the country.

Of the number, 2,251 have so far recovered while 772 have died.