Concerns about the potential loss of public awareness were raised after the health department announced that it would stop the release of daily COVID-19 bulletins on social media and Viber groups starting next year.
Reports said that the Department of Health will cease issuing bulletins pertaining to the country’s coronavirus case count beginning Jan. 1, 2022.
Instead, the public can just visit the agency’s COVID-19 tracker available on its website on doh.gov.ph/covid19tracker.
The DOH said the move would “streamline public communication.”
“This public tracker, which has been operational since the start of the pandemic, contains all information being provided in the case bulletin and daily situation report. Hence, to streamline public communication, the case bulletin and the daily situation report will no longer be issued separately as social media card and as PDF file, respectively,” it said in a statement.
It has since issued over 650 daily COVID-19 bulletins on social media and Viber groups at 4 p.m. since the start of the coronavirus pandemic last year.
The case bulletin usually includes the number of new infections, active cases, deaths, recoveries, activities of testing laboratories and how the medical facilities for patients are faring.
A more detailed situational report is uploaded by the agency every night through a publicly available Google Drive link.
Similar to the daily case bulletin, it wouldn’t be publicly posted by the agency as well starting next month.
The move concerned some Filipinos who reminded the DOH about the prevailing public health crisis. The pandemic was declared in March 2020.
“The Department of Health @DOHgovph should continue posting daily Covid case updates for transparency and for everybody’s awareness,” Bayan Muna Davao coordinator Rauf Sissay tweeted in response to the reports.
“We wouldn’t want to be left in the dark, and bask ourselves in (a) false sense of security,” he added.
“@DOHgovph tapos na ba pandemic siz?????” another Twitter user said, tagging the health agency’s account.
“If there’s one thing commendable this year about @DOHgovph, it was being able to update the nation about COVID-19 cases (despite issues of accuracy and timeliness),” a physician likewise tweeted.
“If DOH is serious about ending the pandemic, they should continue to inform the public of the burden of disease,” he added.
A doctoral epidemiology student from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health similarly stressed the importance of releasing daily bulletins.
“The importance of the daily case bulletins was to help disseminate the latest COVID-19 numbers in time for the primetime news hour nationwide,” Jason Haw wrote on Twitter.
“I say this as someone who was heavily involved in setting up the COVID-19 surveillance system and the public tracker in 2020,” he added.
DOH’s non-issuance of daily case bulletins and situational reports would also come amid the threat of the Omicron variant which has been driving the COVID-19 surge in other countries such as the United Kingdom and South Africa.
Andrew Pekosz, a professor of microbiology at the Johns Hopkins University, previously said that variant’s “ability to evade immunity” and its “really high transmission rate” are what sets its apart from previous variants.
The World Health Organization has so far declared five COVID-19 variants of concern during this pandemic—the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omicron.
As of Monday, the DOH said it has detected the country’s fourth case of Omicron variant through a traveler from the United States who came in Manila on December 10 via Philippine Airlines flight number PR127.