Dr. Rafila: Way of reporting COVID-19 cases makes any data manipulation impossible

Doctor Alexandru Rafila, the chairman of the Romanian Microbiology Society and representative of Romania in the World Health Organization (WHO), stated, on Monday evening, referring to some recent political statements regarding the manipulation by the Government of the data referring to COVID-19 cases recorded in our country, that the way in which this data is collected make "any manipulation practically impossible". "The people need to be aware that there's no kind of fakery, because it's very dangerous to play with these scenarios - that fake cases are reported, more cases or less cases or that there are all sorts of other interests. You should know that at this time the way of reporting cases makes any manipulation of data practically impossible, because these cases are reported by each county. There are 42 reports that are done, are introduced in a dedicated platform, secured by the STS [Special Telecommunication Service] and it's practically impossible [to manipulate]. (...) Thus, there is no command center to take the cases, to process them and introduce them, but each county introduces these cases in this database and then it's beyond any doubt that these numbers cannot be manipulated," Dr. Rafila emphasized at private TV broadcaster Digi 24. He added that the political statements coming in the past few days in this sense are fueled by "lack of knowledge" regarding the reporting system and that only in the early period of the pandemic were the data introduced and medical charts of COVID-19 patients were checked by the personnel of the National Institute for Public Health (INSP), but that there was an overload of these employees and the task of introducing data was distributed to the employees of the county public health directorates. He also showed that at this time people should be "concerned", not panicked by the development of the epidemic. "Parents need not be frightened to not send their children to kindergarten, and the elderly need not be scared so they don't exit their houses at all, but, on the other hand, we also have to be responsible and try and respect the three simple rules we keep repeating," Dr. Rafila also stated.AGERPRES(RO - author: Marius Fratila, editor: Antonia Nita; EN - author: Razvan-Adrian Pandea, editor: Maria Voican)