Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 8) — The country confirmed 287 new COVID-19 fatalities on Sunday, the biggest single-day rise in the death toll since April 9 and the third highest since the pandemic struck the country.
The Department of Health reported a total of 29,122 people nationwide have now lost their lives to the highly contagious disease.
It said that 149, or over half, of the newly announced fatalities were previously tagged as survivors before final validation.
Another 9,671 people have also contracted the coronavirus, bringing the overall case count to 1,658,916, the bulletin showed. Active cases stand at 77,516, which account for 4.7% of the total infections.
The DOH said 93.2% of the currently ill patients are tagged as mild cases, 2.8% as asymptomatic, 1.2% as moderate, 1.7% as severe, and 1% as critical.
Meanwhile, it recorded 8,079 new recoveries, pushing the cumulative tally to 1,552,278.
Besides those reclassified as deaths, 95 other cases were removed from the recovery count — three turned out to still be active, while the remaining 92 were duplicate entries.
Four other cases were also validated to be duplicates and were deleted from the official data, the DOH said.
Lower laboratory output
In the past two days, the country’s new cases exceeded 10,000. All testing laboratories were operational on Aug. 6 and were able to submit their data on time, but the department noted the relatively low figures in the latest update were due to “lower laboratory output last Friday.”
It said 51,296 tests were conducted that day — at least 5,000 tests short of those reported in the past two days.
While the number of new infections dipped, the positivity rate — or the percentage of infected people out of all tested — rose to 20.3% on Aug. 6, from 19.1% the day before.
According to the U.S. nonprofit Covid Act Now, positivity rates should be below 3% to show adequate testing, while a percentage of above 20 points indicate inadequate testing efforts. The World Health Organization set the benchmark at below 5%.
