In PH war on COVID, a key messenger gets shot

This foreboding sign for many residents of packed Metro Manila communities will be a familiar sight again as the metropolis goes on ECQ Aug. 6-20. FILE PHOTO/AFP

MANILA, Philippines—In responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, qualifications matter. You can’t expect an IT expert to administer coronavirus vaccines as much as you should not expect a nurse to program software to calculate the next day’s COVID numbers.

In the urgency of pandemic response, square pegs being forced into round holes could be disastrous.

So when some legislators questioned the qualifications, or processes, of independent COVID surveillance group Octa Research, they inadvertently also brought to light the qualifications, or lack of it as critics claim, of the Duterte administration’s main team in COVID response—the National Task Force against COVID-19 or NTF.

After the government heeded an Octa recommendation to bring back enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) in Metro Manila, three members of the House of Representatives filed a resolution demanding an investigation of Octa’s qualifications, research methodologies, partnerships and composition.

Octa started presenting data and projections on COVID in 2020 which are often cited in media reports.

READ: 5 solons want OCTA Research capabilities, background probed

Ahead of the inquiry, here are some details regarding the OCTA Research group.

What is OCTA Research?

On the “About Us” section of its website, OCTA Research described itself as a “polling, research and consulting firm” which offers a wide range of services including:

• Public opinion research;
• Qualitative and quantitative research;
• Policy research and advocacy; and
• Training and capacity building.

The research team also said it provides “comprehensive, holistic, accurate, rigorous, and insightful data analysis” to clients including those in the government, private sector and non-government organizations.

It also took pride in its “quick turnaround time” in releasing survey and research data results as well as the “cutting-edge qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, designs and techniques” used by its experts.

The group’s office can be found in Alpha Village Old Balara, Quezon City.

People behind the group

According to OCTA Research, its “independent and interdisciplinary research group” is composed of several professors and alumni from different universities, primarily from the University of the Philippines (UP).

Among the list of OCTA Research’s “fellows” are:

• Ranjit Singh Rye  —  Assistant professor at UP’s Department of Political Science.
• Guido David — Professor, UP Institute of Mathematics.
• Rev. Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P. — Molecular biologist, professor at the Department of Biology at Providence College in the US, and a visiting professor at the Univerity of Santo Tomas (UST).
• Bernhard Egwolf —   Associate professor at the  Department of Mathematics and Physics and College of Science of UST.
• Ma. Patricia Agbulos
• Erwin Alampay — Public administration professor of the UP-National College of Public Administrations and Governance (UP-NCPAG).
• Michael Tee — UP College of Medicine professor
• Benjamin Vallejo — Professor, UP Institute of Environmental Science and Meteorology & the Science Society Program (IESM).
• Rodrigo Angelo Ong — UP lecturer.

OCTA Research also works with Blueprint Campaign Consultancy, a communication campaign and consulting company.

The company’s CEO, Eero Rosini Brillantes, is also among the OCTA Research fellows.

Previous studies also named several contributors:

• Benjamin Co — Chief of Infectious Disease at UST Hospital’s Department of Pediatrics.
• Franco Felizarta — California-based infectious disease and internal medicine specialist and member of the UP Medical Alumni Society in the US.
• Troy Gepte — Public health epidemiologist.
• Bryan Albert Lim

Talking about qualifications

While the Octa group has had a degree of influence in the Duterte administration’s COVID response, the policies that make or break the success of pandemic handling by the government are being enforced by the NTF.

Here are the main members of the NTF, a body created to deal with COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, SARS Cov2, which continues to perplex the best scientific minds in the world:

• Delfin Lorenzana, defense secretary and former major general, as NTF chief. Lorenzana had led the 2nd Scout Ranger Battalion Light Armored Brigade during his military days.
• Eduardo Año, interior and local government secretary who is also former military general, as NTF vice chair.
• Carlito Galvez Jr., presidential peace adviser and former armed forces chief, as chief implementer of the NTF.
• Dr. Ted Herbosa as NTF special adviser
• Vince Dizon, BCDA president and CEO, as testing czar and NTF deputy chief implementer
• Leopoldo Vega, health undersecretary and NTF treatment czar
• Restituto Padilla, retired major general, as NTF spokesperson

‘Problematic’ COVID projections?

Infectious disease expert Dr. Edsel Salvaña on Monday (Aug. 2) called out OCTA Research for its “problematic” modeling that is used in projecting COVID cases. Salvaña said these projections are based on “incomplete” and “erroneous” data.

Salvaña, who is a member of the Department of Health’s (DOH) Technical Advisory Group, was criticizing OCTA’s recent calculation of the COVID reproduction number based on cases that were reported in the last two weeks.

“Even a student of clinical epidemiology will tell you that that is not valid because cases that happened within the last two weeks are subject to error because some get tested later or earlier,” Salvaña said in an interview with ANC.

“There are backlogs, so if you are making projections based on data that is incomplete or erroneous, you are going to come out with erroneous projections,” Salvaña said.

“I am not saying that they don’t know what they are doing,” he said.

“There are mathematicians, political scientists, and doctors there, but their model is problematic because they are using data that is incomplete and inconsistent. There are other things that you have to look at,” he added.

READ: OCTA projection on COVID-19 problematic, using incomplete data, says medical expert

Salvaña also called the group’s July 22 report—which warned that the country’s COVID cases may increase to around 8,000 per day—as “fortune-telling.”

READ: OCTA says PH’s new COVID-19 cases could swell to 8,000 this Thursday

Austriaco, on the other hand, defended the OCTA report by stating that “all modeling is fortune-telling.”

Last July 27, the DOH issued a statement asking independent experts to be more careful in making statements about the COVID-19 pandemic in order to avoid causing panic.

READ: DOH to independent experts: ‘Be more careful in making pronouncements’

READ: OCTA to DOH: We’re also careful in using the term ‘surge’

Peter Julian Cayton, a PhD who teaches statistics at the University of the Philippines, has also questioned OCTA Research’s statistical methods as well as the lack of publicly available technical notes from the group.

I tried searching for publicly-available technical notes from Octa Research.

Website (https://t.co/tVKGobgmYo)? Nothing.

No Twitter.

FB (https://t.co/cxaKAunBYb)? Last update was July 18, 2020.

So… nothing public unless media reports on it.

Such mystery.

— Peter Cayton, the Stats Guy (@PJACaytonPhD) February 22, 2021

Personally curious as to how they solve that.

They are a business, & these reports, like any survey firm such as Pulse Asia & SWS, are simply a means to markret their services.

At least with Pulse Asia they share technical notes, a practice of statisticians worth their salt. https://t.co/kJyYmOiGzY

— Peter Cayton, the Stats Guy (@PJACaytonPhD) March 17, 2021

In a tweet posted on April 17, Cayton said the method used by OCTA in its report was contentious after formulating a hypothesis on how OCTA came up with its numbers.

So, this is my hypothesis of how OCTA did it.

I never talked to them or communicated with them, pero questionable yung method nila

So, here are the steps, so you can try, too:

1) Make a PivotTable with the following field settings: pic.twitter.com/Lr6rqT30tM

— Peter Cayton, the Stats Guy (@PJACaytonPhD) April 17, 2021

In a separate tweet published in March, Cayton wrote: “OCTA’s Rt estimate is ridiculous. It’s not backed by reliable predictions.” Rt is the reproduction number of viruses, in this case SARS Cov2.

He again debunked the group’s methods by sharing to the public his own solution.

I have to say it:

OCTA's Rt estimate is ridiculous. It's not backed by reliable predictions.

Our short-term forecasts support an Rt at 1.3 and bet. 1.1-1.5.

Even https://t.co/xYZPQV9kR4 supports this Rt level.https://t.co/G00g8YvWbV

— Peter Cayton, the Stats Guy (@PJACaytonPhD) March 23, 2021

When Rye said last July 27 that Metro Manila is “officially in a surge,” Cayton said it was “weird” that the group was the one declaring a surge when it is “not an official authority.”

READ: OCTA: PH needs ‘circuit-breaking’ lockdowns now amid Delta variant

Precise predictions

Some of the group’s COVID-19 forecasts, however, later turned out to be accurate.

Graphic by Ed Lustan

One of these is its prediction in early April when the group said the country may reach more than a million COVID cases before the end of that month.

“Before the end of April, the Philippines is expected to have recorded more than 1,000,000 total COVID-19 cases,” it said.

This was after the group monitored a rapid increase in cases logged in several cities in Metro Manila, including Mandaluyong, Las Piñas, and San Juan.

READ: PH’s COVID-19 cases may pass 1 million before end of April – OCTA Research

On April 30, the DOH reported that the country’s total COVID-19 cases reached 1,037,460.

Of those, 73,908 were marked as active cases while there were 8,748 new infections. The total recoveries have reached 946,318 and there were 17,234 deaths caused by the disease as of that date.

READ: Over 8,700 new COVID-19 infections bring total PH cases to 1.037M

During the same month, OCTA Research likewise raised the possibility of a less stringent quarantine status in Metro Manila.

READ: MECQ possible next week if COVID transmission rate declines, says OCTA fellow

On April 11, the government downgraded the quarantine classification of Metro Manila and four of its adjacent provinces to a less stringent modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ) from April 12 to April 30.

In March, OCTA Research had separate forecasts for the possible daily number of cases by the end of that month.

The group first projected that new COVID cases might reach up to 5,000 to 6,000 per day by the end of March.

By March 14, it revised its projection and said that the country might record up to 8,000 new cases daily.

READ: COVID-19 cases in PH may rise to 8,000 daily by end of March – OCTA member

From March 25 to March 29, data from DOH showed that the reported new infections ranged from over 8,000 to over 10,000 cases.

On March 29, the Philippines breached the 10,000 daily new cases for the first time, bringing the number of infections to 731,894.

Not in UP

In some of its early studies published in 2020, the research group referred to itself as the “UP-OCTA team.”

“The UP-OCTA team is an independent and interdisciplinary research group composed primarily of UP faculty members and alumni,” the group said in a July 2020 report.

“This independent research team also includes contributors from the University of Santo Tomas and Providence College, USA,” it said.

It was followed by a disclaimer saying:

“The findings and recommendations in the report are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the University of the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas, Providence College, or any of its units.”

https://www.facebook.com/OCTAResearch/posts/152377653106743

Some of the research group’s reports were previously made available on UP’s website.

However, as of Wednesday (Aug. 4), content by OCTA Research has already been taken down and can no longer be searched or viewed on the university website.

SCREENSHOT of UP website which had carried research works of Octa.

In a tweet on March 8, Cayton clarified that the research group has no office inside the UP campus.

“They do not exist in UP’s organizational structure,” he said.

It echoed his separate tweet posted in October 2020 wherein he explained that OCTA Research is not part of the UP COVID-19 Pandemic Response Team “nor a UP entity.”

“It’s a private consulting firm with agents who are UP professors,” the professor said.

“They’re not UP Octa Research. Just Octa Research. Their successes and shortcomings are theirs, not UP’s,” he added.

As Octa faces grilling from the House, the doubts and suspicions thrown at it serve as a reminder of the lessons in the children’s tale about a naked emperor who had to know the truth about his undress from someone who shouted it.

TSB