Context

The Philippines has been battling its own coronavirus outbreak since early March, when the first case of local transmission has been recorded. Since then, it has triggered the declaration of Code Red Sub-level 2 (March 12), Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) which covers all of Luzon (March 16 - April 30), and start of mass testing initiatives (April 14), among others.

In the early days of the outbreak, the Philippine Department of Health (DOH) has released pdfs containing COVID-19 confirmed cases, together with Filipino confirmed cases overseas and confirmed foreigners with travel history in the Philippines. After a while, DOH has published an ArcGIS dashboard where case information can be exported through an ArcGIS API. This ArcGIS dashboard and its corresponding API was eventually decommissioned last April 6, and was replaced by a Tableau dashboard last April 12. DOH now releases data through Google Sheets data drops daily, the first drop being on April 14.

Content

This collection of datasets contains information related to the COVID-19 outbreak in the Philippines, made available to the public by DOH through their Google Sheets data drop. This will be updated daily, or as DOH releases new data.

The Case Information CSV file outlines the confirmed cases and their corresponding details such as:

• Age
• Sex
• Residence (city and province)
• Status (Recovered, Died, or Admitted)
• With exposure or not and type of exposure
• Other relevant dates (date announced, date of death, date recovered, date of death/recovery announcement)

Unlike the previous ArcGIS data and previous press releases, the Google Sheets data does not include:

• The original case ID convention (PH1 - PHxxxx)
• The health facility where each case is admitted
• The cause of death and comorbidities of death cases
• Date of onset of symptoms for recovered patients

The DOH Data Collect - Daily Report CSV file contains the number of available and occupied ward, isolation, and ICU beds, as well as mechanical ventilators, by medical facility.

The DOH Data Collect - Weekly Report CSV file denotes availability of personal protective equipment (PPEs) for each facility.

The Testing Aggregates CSV file denotes current testing capability of the Philippines, as well as the number of tests conducted and corresponding outcomes.

Technical Notes from DOH

Case Information

Data is extracted from the COVID-19 Information System by the DOH Epidemiology Bureau (EB) every 12 noon daily. Data is encoded from mostly paper case investigation forms (CIFs), therefore some encoding discrepancies may occur. All case data are dynamically updated daily as more accurate information is triangulated from a variety of official sources. Topline values are processed and validated by DOH EB. Regional and provincial/highly urbanized city/independent component city breakdowns of cases, recoveries, and deaths may vary from official values reported by Regional Epidemiology Surveillance Units (RESUs) as validation of reported residence in CIFs are ongoing. Please always refer to the latest release.

Health Facility Capacity from the DOH Data Collect

Data is encoded and submitted daily, for bed occupancy and mechanical ventilator utilization as intended for Covid-19 cases, and weekly, for select logistics inventory, by hospitals and infirmaries through the DOH DataCollect BedTracker App v3.1. As of May 12, 2020, the response rates for the DOH DataCollect BedTracker app are at 98.0% for hospitals and 97.7% for infirmaries.

Testing Aggregates

Data is extracted from tracking sheets accomplished daily by COVID-19 Testing Laboratories. It is then collated from laboratory results released as of 6pm daily, and are approved after a verification process by the representatives of each laboratory. These results have to undergo processing and case validation by DOH EB.

As of May 15, no testing data will be released until inconsistencies in the self-reported data are clarified with the laboratories.

Acknowledgements

This dataset has been made available publicly by the Philippines' Department of Health through their Google Sheets data drop. Cover photo by CDC on Unsplash.

Inspiration

This data and previous datasets released by DOH have been the basis of the Philippine COVID-19 Tableau Dashboards (https://bit.ly/PHCOVID19 and https://bit.ly/PHTESTING) maintained by yours truly. The goal is to make all data related to the Philippine COVID-19 outbreak available and easily understandable to Filipinos, as well as to open it to experts all over the world.

The data I'm using for my Tableau dashboard is in a transformed format; I've included them below.