MANILA—The health department on Saturday said it has fixed technical issues hounding its data collection system, which prompted it to report no recent deaths on Friday.

Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said COVIDKaya, its central data repository, was fixed Saturday morning with the help of the Department of Information and Communications Technology, which helps to manage it.

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Vergeire added that there might be a slight increase in the case results for the day due to the backlogs.

“Ang ating COVIDKaya ay nagkaroon ng technical issues early part of this week at ’yun po ay napag-alaman natin na ’yung ating central storage base ay kakaunti na lang at hindi na po napu-push ang ating mga data coming from our laboratories and reporting units,” Vergeire explained in a public briefing.

(Our COVIDKaya experienced technical issues earlier this week, which was due to the diminishing central storage base. This was the reason why data coming from our laboratories and reporting units did not push through)

She added that COVIDKaya is important to determine the patient’s “outcome” or their health status, whether they have already recovered, died, or if they are still battling the respiratory disease.

She also clarified that the zero reported deaths did not mean there were no casualties from the novel coronavirus, saying that the development was due to the system issue.

The DOH earlier said that it resorted to manual “solutions” in reporting Friday’s cases following the system glitch.

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The agency said the data it submitted for the day could not have “up-to-date data entries in certain fields, such as health status, residence, quarantine status.”

This came as the country is experiencing a local transmission of the more contagious Delta variant, which first emerged in India and ripped through that country’s health care system at its peak in April.

Philippine authorities have been scrambling to try and stop the variant from spreading after this triggered a surge in infections across Southeast Asia, most especially Indonesia.