OCTA Research on Monday, Aug. 2, cited that the data they are using have been consistent with the pandemic trends, in light of the criticism of a member of the Department of Health's expert panel group.

"I want to defend my colleague, Dr. Guido David, who is responsible primarily for the calculations of the R . If you look at his calculations which are the official OCTA calculations for the R values in March--which were the values that we use to urge the government to shut down earlier to prevent the tragedy that we saw in March and April--it turns out that those numbers are actually very comparable to the numbers that were published by the Imperial College London at the University of Sussex. So you have numbers that OCTA produces that are comparable to international organizations who are calculating the same thing," OCTA Research fellow biologist-priest Nicanor Austriaco explained in an ANC interview.

He also noted that having an absolute value is not as important as the pandemic trend.

"One of the things that we keep pointing out when seeing an increasing trend in the R, especially if there is a dramatic increase in the trend of the R, whether it’s 1.12 or 1.16, the fact that it has changed from a 0.8 a week ago is what we are looking at," he added.

Dr. Edsel Salvana, a member of the DOH Technical Advisory Group, on Monday, criticized OCTA for "problematic" modeling because of "incomplete and inconsistent" data.

"Our data says it all. We predicted every single surge. When the Department of Health basically denied the presence of a surge, we warned of a surge and we asked the government for an earlier lockdown early in March. It did not happen," Austriaco said.

"Again, these models that the data that we’re producing had been consistent with the trends and dynamics of the pandemic for the past 15, 16 months," he pointed out.

Austriaco further noted that OCTA's data and predictions are all published and are "subject to peer review."

"What’s really striking is unlike many other government agencies around the world, we have no sense of the predictions and forecasts from the DOH. I’ve never seen them publish. It’s interesting that the criticism is that we are not accountable. Our data is very transparent," he said.

The OCTA fellow reiterated that the group is assuming that a community transmission of the highly transmissible Delta COVID-19 variant is already present in the country "simply because there are Delta COVID patients and the number of Delta COVID patients is increasing, especially in the NCR ."

"In his remarks, he pointed out that the DOH is undertaking all the studies to confirm this reality. But I think most people who are looking at the spread, who are looking at the data will pretty much infer that community transmission is there even though there has been no formal confirmation of such," Austriaco said.