People wearing face masks and faceshields pray at an outdoor altar at the San Felipe Neri Parish Church in Mandaluyong on September 24, 2021. Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News
MANILA - The Department of Health (DOH) on Tuesday announced 102 additional deaths due to COVID-19 as part of Monday's tally, amid technical issues in the agency's data system, updating the country's total number of fatalities to 37,596.
The DOH COVID-19 bulletin issued on Monday reported 93 deaths.
In a statement, the DOH said they are still manually encoding the data on fatalities logged in the past few days.
The health department reported zero new deaths for three straight days, or from Sept. 24 to 26. In late July, the DOH also reported no new fatalities due to the same issue.
On Monday, the agency announced that it would "report backlog deaths in separate advisories." Further advisories will be issued, it said.
The agency's data collating system COVIDKaya is encountering technical issues, the DOH said, which is why it has posted COVID-19 bulletins later than usual in the past few days.
DOH Epidemiology Bureau Director Alethea De Guzman explained that the COVIDKaya system went down from Sept. 23 to 26 after it "reached its capacity."
"This was mainly due to the limited server capacity of CK to handle, receive, and process bulk data pushed from the CDRS," according to De Guzman's presentation.
This resulted in the rejection of the data pushed in its COVID Document Repository System (CDRS), where raw information gets processed from laboratories, and the COVIDKaya interface being inaccessible from end users to "encode new cases and update existing ones."
The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), which also manages the server, is trying to resolve the problem, according to the official.
"The DICT is trying to identify the immediate fixes para lumaki ang server capacity natin, and in the longer term, more sustainable fixes para we don't experience these downtimes frequently," De Guzman said.
Based on Monday's bulletin, the Philippines' total confirmed COVID-19 cases stood at 2,509,177, including 158,169 active infections.
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