CEBU CITY, Philippines – The Cebu City Health Department (CCHD) announced on Monday, July 6, that it will stop posting on its Facebook page updates on coronavirus cases in Cebu City.
“Upon recommendation by the IATF during the meeting earlier, we will no longer be posting daily reports on our page for the Cebu City COVID-19 monitoring,” the CCHD said in its post, referring to the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) on the coronavirus outbreak.
“This was recommended by the IATF to avoid confusion with the public as we are still harmonizing data with other health departments,” it added.
LOOK: Cebu City Health Dept announces it will stop publishing COVID-19 updates for Cebu City after the IATF ordered the LGU and DOH7 to reconcile their data.
— Rappler (@rapplerdotcom) July 6, 2020
CCHD urged the public to check the DOH page – which has been reporting different numbers – instead. | via @ryanmacasero pic.twitter.com/lqV7q3DIW4
The CCHD said the data they have been posting are “actual cases” validated by the city’s contact tracing teams, but to avoid causing confusion, they asked the public to refer to the Department of Health Central Visayas’ (DOH-7) official Facebook page for updates.
Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu ordered the CCHD and the DOH-7 to reconcile their data on the number of coronavirus infections in the city – now considered the hot spot of COVID-19 in the country. (READ: Cimatu orders DOH-7, Cebu City to reconcile coronavirus data)
“[I want ] clean data,” Cimatu said in his press conference with the national IATF.
Cimatu said the two agencies were reporting different numbers – a result of communication gaps between the two departments and differences in verification of cases.
“We’re really trying to call attention to city health (office) regularly to cleanse and unify the data,” Jaime Bernadas, head of DOH-7, said last Wednesday, July 1.
He did not elaborate on exactly what caused the discrepancies.
This comes a week after Cebu City Mayor Edgar Labella said he was in favor of asking the CCHD to publish the breakdown of cases per barangay again.
“Access should not be denied. These are matters of public concern,” Labella said. The CCHD used to post the breakdown of cases per barangay frequently but stopped doing so last May.
The last update posted on the CCHD’s Facebook page showed that Cebu City has 152 new coronavirus cases and a total of 6,141 cases as of Sunday, July 5. (READ: Cebu City confirms 1,000 coronavirus cases in a week)
The number of coronavirus cases in the Philippines has reached 46,333 after the health department reported 2,099 new cases on Monday, July 6. – Rappler.com
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