Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 23)— The country tallied 17,411 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, bringing the nationwide count to 2,434,753, the Department of Health said.
The DOH case bulletin reported that out of the total number of infections, 6.8% or 165,790 are active cases or currently sick patients. At least 92.1% of active cases have mild symptoms, 3.1% are asymptomatic, 2.73% are in moderate condition, 1.5% have severe symptoms and 0.7% are in critical condition.
The death toll jumped to 37,405 — which is 1.54% of the COVID-19 count — after 177 more people lost their lives. It’s the 12th straight day that there were over a hundred daily deaths.
Meanwhile, 2,231,558 have recovered — about 91.7% of the case total — with 14,090 new survivors.
The DOH said it reclassified 88 survivors into fatalities after validation and deleted 77 duplicate cases, including 55 recoveries.
The total excludes data from three laboratories that failed to submit their reports on time, the DOH added. These laboratories contributed an average of 0.3% of tested samples and 0.3% of positive individuals in the last 14 days.
The figure is the lowest since Aug. 17. However, a positivity rate above 20% is at critical level, which means more coronavirus tests need to be done, according to US nonprofit Covid Act Now. Meanwhile, a rate below 3% indicates adequate testing.
For the World Health Organization, the positivity rate should be below 5% to show that an area has controlled the infection.
The positivity rate or percentage of tested people with positive results slightly fell from 24.8% based on tests on Sept. 20 to 24.6% based on 71,010 tests reported on Sept. 21.
OCTA Research fellow David Guido said the more than 17,000 cases reported were at the lower end of the group’s projections but this may be due to incomplete data.
“I suppose the backlog have not been included yet, so we should expect an artificial spike within the next 2 days,” said Guido in a tweet.
