DOH: Delayed death reporting due to COVIDKaya downtime

MANILA— The Department of Health has encountered technical issues in its digital platform for COVID-19 information management after its server reached capacity, an official said Tuesday.

The downtime of COVIDKaya led to no new death reported from Sept. 24 to 26, Dr. Alethea De Guzman, the agency's epidemiology bureau director, told reporters.

"The reason provided to us was that the server already reached its capacity," she said in a press briefing. 

"Right now the DICT [Department of Information and Communications Technology] is trying to identify what will be the immediate fixes para po lumaki 'yung (to expand our) server capacity natin and [for] longer-term, more sustainable fixes para (so) we don't experience these downtimes frequently."

De Guzman said the COVIDKaya server went down from Sept. 23 to 26 "mainly due to the limited server capacity" to handle, receive and process bulk data pushed from the COVID-19 Document Repository System.

Before the DOH releases its daily case bulletin, data is extracted from COVIDKaya at 1 p.m. daily. This linelist undergoes necessary formatting and initial preprocessing in preparation for deduplication, De Guzman said.

Second, tagging of duplicates is done through automated and manual processes. This will be reconciled to the original entry before being dropped from the linelist.

Finally, the deduplicated lines is further checked for consistency and validity of case information. The data drop is generated and is used to update the COVID-19 Tracker, she added.

While the digital platform was down, De Guzman said the DOH manually extracted the data uploaded to CDRS. However, since data is directly extracted from the CDRS, case information such as the patient's death information are not available.

On Sept. 18, the DOH reported an additional 102, deaths raising the country's COVID-19 death toll to 37,596.

"As the technical team continues to manually encode data on fatalities reported from previous days, further advisories will be issued," the agency said in a statement.