UP team: COVID trend not a game
The trend of COVID-19 cases in the country gives no reason for Filipinos to raise their fists in the air in exuberance, according to the University of the Philippines research team, whose projections Malacañang claimed the Philippines beat the other day.
UP researcher Prof. Ranjit Singh Rye said what their team does “has never been a game” where there are winners and losers, adding there was no reason to be happy when the
country has registered 10,000 cases in two weeks up to the end of June.
Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, also of the UP OCTA Research team, said it was more important to look at the trend that figures from the government were showing rather than the target being hit, as the former was more representative of the pandemic happening in the country.
June 30 data from the Department of Health (DOH) showed that there were already 47,347 individuals who tested positive for COVID-19 out of the 666,678 individuals tested nationwide. Subtracting the 37,514 confirmed cases will yield a 9,833 gap between the number of confirmed cases and the number of positive individuals.
While the number of those who tested positive may not all turn out as confirmed cases after validation, it gives an approximation of what the trend could be in subsequent days.
“If there are 46,000 individuals positive for COVID-19 but there are only 38,000 that are validated, which number is more representative of the pandemic happening in the country?” Austriaco told “The Chiefs” the other night on Cignal TV’s One News.
“I think it’s important that we emphasize that it’s more important to look at a trend rather than a target. And the concern that many of us have is the trend is going up,” he added.
The research team’s statements came on the heels of presidential spokesman Harry Roque’s ecstatic welcoming of the country’s 37,000 cases the other day, “beating” the UP OCTA research team’s projection of 40,000 coronavirus cases nationwide by the end of the month.
The latest projection by the researchers estimated that cases may hit 60,000 by end of July if there is significant community transmission across the country.
In exuberance, Roque had said: “Let’s do it again in July! So we are winning.”
“We stand by our forecast, we missed it by less than six percent which is kind of good, but we’re also very sad that we’ve reached this far,” Rye said.
“While we respect the exuberance of our very hardworking and burdened spokesman, we should be more cautious. The message is: ‘the pandemic is here’ and it’s spreading and we need to work together and there’s so much work to be done,” he added.
Roque, however, remained unfazed as he set a goal to monitor the Philippines’ ‘successes’ against the virus. “Every month now, I’m going to keep on doing it and I really don’t care about the critics because, I think, people should be reminded that although there are mathematical models, we could still control what happens in our lives,” he said.