THE Department of Health (DOH) in the Cordillera Administrative Region started to use a new system in reporting confirmed coronavirus disease (Covid–19) cases.

Dr. Amelita Pangilinan, DOH–Cordillera director, said the validation process has sped up significantly over the past week as a result of an increase in disease surveillance officers due to the health department’s mass hiring program.

This aside from the recent rollout of the CovidKaya information system, a fully automated data collection platform that has helped DOH receive fast live updates from hospitals and laboratories across the Philippines.

“The daily case total profile comprise of old and fresh cases. Rise in cases is due to the increase testing and clearing of backlog. We felt this in the region when our Baguio General Hospital sub-national hospital experienced backlog,” Pangilanan said.

Pangilinan added the reporting of Covid-19 cases has experienced a delay due to operational issues with the manual data collection and needs to be taken into consideration when reading the numbers, because they do not translate to an increase in local transmission.

“The number of confirmed cases as a result of the increased testing and the aggressive efforts of the DOH to catch up with the testing backlog showed an increase in fresh and new cases. An example of this is the data on May 28 which showed 539 cases reported and out of this 539 cases, 109 were only fresh cases or those cases that have just finished laboratory results in the span of three days after testing, while the remaining balance composed of those late cases that have been released by BGHMC pertaining to other earlier cases as evaluated by our Epidemiology Bureau,” Pangilinan added.

With the bolstering of the nation’s Covid-19 data collection and information system, the DOH will be publishing the daily reports in a different format to better illustrate the variance between newly validated cases and late cases, or those included in the backlog for validation.

DOH added it is confident the Philippine situation is improving as indicators outside the raw number of newly confirmed cases are looking favorable.

When observing the actual date of death and not the date of reporting, the deaths have been decreasing.

Case doubling time, or the time it takes for cases to increase twofold, has also slowed down from once every three to four days, to once every seven days, or reiteration that this is the case if the actual date of onset is observed.