An estimated 3 million COVID-19 cases could have gone unreported from April to June, an economics lecturer from the Ateneo de Manila University said Thursday, but the Department of Health (DOH) quickly disputed this figure.
The estimate from the Ateneo emerged even as the DOH reported 4,339 new COVID-19 infections, bringing the country’s total to 178,022 cases, and marking the third straight day in which more than 4,000 new cases were reported.
In an interview on GMA Network’s Unang Hirit, Jan Frederick Cruz of the Ateneo Department of Economics said the estimate of 3 million unreported cases was based on current data on COVID-19.
Cruz said the methodology used was based on a previous study, “Evaluating the Massive Underreporting and Undertesting of COVID-19 Cases in Multiple Global Epicenters.”
“There has long been speculation about underreporting,” Cruz said in Filipino. “What we did was just to put a number to show how serious that underreporting is.”
He added that the computation—which he described as a crude estimation—was based on a paper published in an academic journal several months ago, and that was included in a World Health Organization (WHO) in a scientific briefing.
That study sought to determine “the real” number of COVID-19 cases using the number of confirmed infections and fatalities in the US, South Korea, Japan, China, France and Italy.
Cruz said the methodology applied to these industrialized economies was applied to the ASEAN-5 for his study, including the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore.
“The analysis reveals that 96 percent to 99 percent of COVID-19 cases in the ASEAN-5 were undetected during April-June 2020,” said the study, which was released on Tuesday.
“Roughly 3 million Filipinos (2.6 percent of the national population) may have been infected by the virus in the same period—the worst record in the ASEAN-5 group in percentage terms,” it added.
The study revealed that the confirmed COVID-19 cases are only 1 percent to 2 percent of the estimated unreported cases, Cruz said.
Cruz said the Philippines was the worst performer among the ASEAN-5 in controlling the spread of the infection, saying that the country has a high proportion of COVID-19 cases over its population.
While acknowledging the improvement in the testing capacity, Cruz said the coverage should be expanded.
He said that mass testing will improve the response against COVID-19.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire, however, disputed Cruz’s conclusions in his paper “An Empirical Argument for Mass Testing: Crude Estimates of Unreported COVID-19 Cases in the Philippines vis-à-vis Others in the ASEAN-5.”
Cruz, one of those involved in the study, said estimates were computed by multiplying the number of reported cases with the ratio obtained by dividing the COVID-19 case fatality rate of the Philippines against that of Singapore, which has the lowest COVID-19 case fatality rate.
But Vergeire said there were differences in health systems before the pandemic. The Philippines, she said, was decentralized, and capabilities differed across the country.
“If you compare it by the numbers without considering the health system capacity of a country, that is not appropriate,” Vergeire said at a Palace briefing.
“One of the bases that they used was the case fatality rate, and our economists and epidemiologists have said that such is not correct,” Vergeire added.
Still, she said, the DOH will study the findings and consider them in improving its COVID-19 response.
The DOH announced 4,339 new infections Thursday, 2,590 of which were from Metro Manila.
Laguna had 223; Cavite, 155; Cebu, 128; and Rizal, 109.
Health officials reported 88 new deaths, bringing the total fatalities due to COVID-19 to 2,883.
Total recoveries rose to 114,114 after 727 more patients recovered from the respiratory illness.
The remaining 61,025 are active cases undergoing treatment or quarantine, 91.3 percent of which are mild, 6.6 percent of which are asymptomatic, 0.9 percent of which are severe, and 1.2 percent of which are in critical condition.
The DOH said figures reported were based on data submitted by 100 out of the 109 operational laboratories.