CPRC takes four hours to prepare data for daily COVID-19 report

The team has been entrusted to prepare daily reports on the COVID-19 situation in the country, which they have to do in less than four hours, before it is presented by Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah at his daily media conference on the COVID-19 development.

Sharing the challenges facing the team in gathering and processing the data, Dr Noor Hisham said they would have to analyse the data and translate it into a report that is simple, concise and easy for the ordinary people to understand.

“The daily data is analysed until noon and the task force has less than four hours to release the daily report, with the latest information. May all matters be eased, InsyaAllah,” he posted on his Facebook this morning.

In the same post, Dr Noor Hisham also shared a Facebook post uploaded by a member of the task force, Dr Mohamad Fadli Khairie, on the role and responsibilities of the team.

According to Dr Mohamad Fadli, every day at 8am, the Health Director-General will call for a meeting among all the stakeholders in MOH COVID-19 management, including medical experts, to discuss current issues, such as details on daily cases, active clusters, the condition at hospitals and health clinics, human resources, as well as measures to be taken to address problems, if any.

“Our job starts with receiving reports and notifications on positive cases reported from midnight until noon for the day.

“All information that we received will be studied to ensure accuracy and validity of the data. Each patient is assigned with a case number as de-identification to enable data analysis and ensure patient data confidentiality,” Dr Mohamad Fadli wrote.

He explained that each positive case being investigated will be identified in terms of its socio-demographic information, the cycle threshold value (CT value), cause of infection, type of screening and risk of transmission to the community.

Apart from that, he said connections between cases will be studied, especially when it involves other states, in which discussions with the related states and districts will be held to announce the identified clusters.

“The critical time for us is between 4 pm and 5 pm,which is before the daily media conference on the development of COVID-19 by the Health Director-General...all data must be finalised and verified so that there are no errors. All processes should be done fast and accurately.

“It becomes a challenge when the number of daily cases is high which makes data analysis difficult. Whatever happens, having zero-error and 100 per cent accuracy is always our goal,” he explained.

Dr Mohamad Fadli said with the final data, all the cases involved would undergo a geocoding process for township (mukim) and district classification to be used by the MySejahtera application team for the hotspot tracking process.