The regions with the highest number of new cases in that period were Metro Manila (358 or 17%), Western Visayas (307 or 15%), and Calabarzon (214 or 10%).
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 17) — The Department of Health (DOH) reported 2,196 new COVID-19 infections on Thursday.
It’s the fourth straight day with over 2,000 new cases – pushing the nationwide tally to 3,646,793.
Active cases or people currently sick dropped further to 66,588 – or 1.8% of the COVID-19 count.
Of the active cases, 60,848 have mild symptoms; 2,913 are in moderate condition; 1,428 have severe symptoms; 1,090 have no symptoms; and 309 are in critical condition.
The death toll jumped to 55,330 – 1.52% of all infections – after 107 more people lost their lives to the disease.
Meanwhile, 4,409 others got well, raising the survivor tally to 3,524,875 – which is 96.7% of the case total.
Three laboratories did not submit their data on time, the DOH said. These laboratories contributed an average of 0.8% of tested samples and 1.9% of positive individuals in the last 14 days.
Of the newly reported infections, 2,078 (95%) occurred within the past 14 days, or from Feb. 4 to 17.
Among the 107 fatalities, 70 (65%) occurred this month and 19 (18%) in January.
There were also 18 deaths traced to last year: four in December, eight in October, three in September, two in August, and one in June.
The belated reporting is due to late encoding of information to the COVIDKaya data storage system, the DOH explained.
The positivity rate, or percentage of tested people with positive results, slightly rose to 9.7% based on 29,392 tests reported on Feb. 15.
The World Health Organization recommends a positivity rate of below 5% for countries or regions to reopen.
The agency also said it reclassified 79 initially tagged survivors as among the dead.
