THE Department of Health has vehemently denied the allegations of Vice President Leni Robredo that the agency is “misleading” the public on the handling of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in the country.
In televised press briefing Tuesday afternoon, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire assured Robredo that the DOH has been transparent in disclosing relevant information to the public.
“The department has no intention of deceiving the people because we have been disclosing all important data needed in making an analysis,” Vergeire said.
“There is no deceit here,” she added. “Rest assured that our agency will continue to be transparent with all the data that we are releasing.”
Robredo had earlier slammed the DOH for allegedly “misleading” the public while attempting to “sugarcoat” the truth regarding the status of the pandemic.
In particular, Robredo pointed to the claims of the DOH of a supposed lower COVID-19 positivity rate in the country from 22 percent in April to about 8 percent in July, saying they are not even the average for the respective months.
Vergeire said the 22 percent positivity rate mentioned last week was for April 3, and the cumulative positivity rate as of April 30 was 10.9 percent.
She said the cumulative positivity rate as of July 23 is down to 8.8 percent.
“Positivity rate is used to determine if the country has enough testing capacity as this is used as basis to determine if the country can ably detect COVID-19 cases,” Vergeire said.
“All we want is to show that there have been improvements, especially in terms of testing capacity,” she added.
To further prove their point, Vergeire said they have been stressing the country has a higher positivity rate than the international goal of having less than 5 percent.
“We have been coming out with global parameters in order for the public to see if we are doing enough to control COVID-19.As you can see, we are still higher than the World Health Organization standard,” Vergeire said.
