The Department of Health discredited Wednesday a claim by the Concerned Doctors and Citizens of the Philippines that the country’s COVID-19 deaths—54,097 as of mid week—were double than what was being reported.
The group cited the Philippine Statistics Authority, which it said recorded more than 105,000 total COVID deaths versus the 54,054 reported by the DOH as of Monday.
Data of the DOH and the PSA do not match as the health agency verifies reported COVID-19 deaths and does not consider incidental cases or those hospitalized for a different cause but when tested yielded a positive result, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said.
Local governments sometimes do not put the correct immediate and underlying causes of death, Vergeire said.
“We are debunking this allegation…The DOH data is (sic) the official number for COVID-19 deaths because our data is being cleaned, being validated. Whatever we report is exactly those who died due to COVID and not an incidental finding that they had COVID, Vergeire said.
She said the DOH was coordinating with the PSA to “harmonize” the data.
The DOH announced Wednesday afternoon that total COVID-19 deaths in the country stood at 54,097 after an additional 43 were recorded over the last 24 hours.
According to the Commission on Population and Development (POPCOM), with initial data from the PSA, the first 11 months of 2021 saw more registered deaths across the Philippines, which stood at 768,504—higher by 154,562 than all of 2020.
This number hiked the country’s mortality rate to 6.98 per thousand, as against 5.8 per thousand in 2020.
This, according to POPCOM, set a record in the number of Filipinos dying in a year since post-World War 2.
COVID-19, classified either as “identified” or “unidentified” by medical practitioners, was the underlying cause of death for 75,285 Filipinos—higher than the 30,140 deaths from the same cause from March to December 2020.
It was the second-leading cause of death next to ischemic heart disease POPCOM executive director Dr. Juan A. Perez III said about 105,425 deaths, or 11.04% of 954,585 deaths from April 2020 to October 2021, were classified as caused by COVID-19.
Perez explained there are two kinds of COVID-19 deaths: COVID-19 “identified,” which can be confirmed via RT-PCR tests, and COVID-19 “unidentified,” with laboratory tests or clinical findings by a doctor indicative of COVID-19, but without a confirmatory test up to the time of death.
Both are considered valid causes of death, and are methods accepted by the World Health Organization to report the disease, Perez said.