Editorial

3 million Covid-19 cases?

A non-peer-reviewed academic paper published on the website of Ateneo de Manila University states that there are close to three million coronavirus cases in the Philippines that may have gone undetected.

Accordingly, researcher Jan Frederick Cruz found out using epidemiological and statistical modeling to estimate underreporting in the Philippines that COVID-19 cases in the Philippines from April to June may have been 2,812,891 instead of the reported 34,354. Cruz said this means that only 1.22 percent of the infections were detected during that time.  

Cruz said they looked at a methodology from an established paper, trying to compute for underreporting in industrial economies that became major epicenters of the COVID-19 pandemic. His paper also looked into the COVID-19 situation in four other Southeast Asian states using the same computations and methodology employed to determine the prevalence of the coronavirus in the Philippines.

The analysis revealed that 96 to 99 percent of infections in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore in the second quarter of the year may have been unconfirmed, with his calculations suggesting that Indonesia missed the most cases among the five Southeast Asian countries.

However, he pointed out that the high ballpark figure for Indonesia may be due to its high population, which is more than double than that of the Philippines.

Cruz claim there was a delay in government intervention that led to the outcome the Philippines is facing.

For the record, travel restrictions were first placed in Metro Manila midnight of March 15, and travel ban was first imposed in February for people coming from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Cruz pointed out that in the Philippines, an estimated 98 percent of the infections were not discovered during the second quarter of the year.

Meanwhile, Thailand may have had 89,357 infections instead of the reported 1,520, and Malaysia’s estimated cases may have reached 158,237, contrary to the official tally of 6,011.

The research paper shows that the five economies in Southeast Asia are collectively referred to as “ASEAN-5”.