OCTA attests to accuracy of projections

MANILA, Philippines — The OCTA Research Group has stood firm on the accuracy of its data and projections on COVID-19 that are widely credited in the media and used by policy makers for pandemic response, but are being questioned by some congressmen.

OCTA fellow Guido David defended their data, which he said has a margin of error of only five percent, and their projections, which were 100 percent accurate.

“The level of error we’re seeing is only five percent. And we have validated it with studies that it’s five percent (margin of) error,” he told congressmen during the inquiry of the House committee on good government and public accountability.

“Our projections and our models have 100 percent surge detection accuracy. The important matter is our models predicted a surge, and it happened. We only projected a surge three times and it all happened,” David stressed.

During the hearing, congressmen questioned the accuracy of data from OCTA.

“We have not gotten anything from them and people are in desperate need of some assurance but what they release is not 100 percent accurate,” Deputy Speaker Lito Atienza alleged.

The Buhay party-list representative even proposed to the House to stop the group from releasing its reports and projections to the public that he said have only been creating panic.

“I’m urging my colleagues, let us bar this OCTA from making any pronouncement,” he suggested.

Deputy minority leader Stella Quimbo, for her part, said the margin of error of OCTA’s data could be more than five percent.

The Marikina City representative presented a data sheet listing OCTA’s projections in contrast with the Department of Health (DOH)’s data since June last year, which showed that the margin of error reached as high as 79 percent.

She specifically cited the data last March when OCTA projected that the Philippines would log 5,000 to 6,000 daily COVID-19 cases by the end of the same month. But the country would later log an average of 8,971 daily infections in the said period or a variance of 79.4 percent.

Quimbo, a former econometrician, said that while the group had projections that were under the five percent margin of error, it had at least six projections that were over that margin.

“This is a big variance in the margin of error,” the economist-lawmaker pointed out.

But David insisted that their five percent margin of error has been validated in studies.

“Sometimes a trend will vary or a lot of trends will vary,” David said, adding that the large percent variances showed by Quimbo were “under-projections” that don’t affect the group’s prediction of surge in COVID-19 cases.

OCTA founder Ranjit Rye, an assistant professor of political science at the University of the Philippines, also explained to lawmakers that their data “largely come from the DOH.”

“We like to reiterate we are an independent scientific group, not a medical group and one of our research objectives – our agenda is to do data analytics for COVID-19 so we get our data solely from official source which is the Department of Health,” he pointed out.

Rye also clarified that they first submit their data and projections to the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) before they release it publicly.

The congressmen also questioned the source of funding of the independent research group.

Rye stressed that OCTA is “self-funded” and never received funding from the government, adding that they started the research group as an “advocacy” and only started to accept commissioned work to sustain it.

“As of now, OCTA is self-funded – (with) funds that we generated along with other fellows. We are now starting our public opinion research work, and slowly – hopefully – it will pick up and generate some more funds (with which) to continue our advocacy. If that will not work, then we will close down the research – that part,” he told lawmakers.

“The initial survey we had was out of pocket, but (for) the succeeding surveys we had some subscribers like any fledgling public opinion research. Our non-commissioned survey still holds. We still have seed funds for that for at least two surveys. We already prepared that. We don’t know if we’re going to have another one,” Rye added.