Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 18) – The country tallied over 2,000 new daily COVID-19 cases for the fifth straight day after the Department of Health (DOH) reported 2,232 new infections on Friday.
Of the newly reported cases, 95% or 2,131 occurred in the past 14 days, or from Feb. 5-18.
The nationwide COVID-19 case tally rose to 3,648,925, with 1.8% or 65,796 active cases or people currently sick. Of the active cases, 60,252 have mild symptoms; 2,869 are in moderate condition; 1,422 have severe symptoms; 946 have no symptoms; and 307 are in critical condition.
The DOH also recorded 79 new fatalities, pushing the death toll to 55,409 or 1.52% of all infections.
Of the newly recorded deaths, 16 occurred in February and 32 in January. The rest were from 2021—one in November, 11 in October, 12 in September, five in August, and two in July. The fatalities were belatedly reported due to late encoding of information to the COVIDKaya data storage system.
Meanwhile, 3,010 others got well, raising the recovery count to 3,527,720 or 96.7% of total cases.
The country’s positivity rate or percentage of tested people with positive results slightly decreased to 9.1% based on 29,812 tests reported on Feb. 16.
The World Health Organization recommends a positivity rate of below 5% for countries to reopen.
The top three regions with the highest number of new infections in that period were Metro Manila (378 or 18%), Calabarzon (236 or 11%), and Region 7 (212 or 10%).
The DOH added it reclassified 70 survivors into deaths after validation and deleted 100 duplicate cases, including 95 recoveries.
Five laboratories did not submit their data on time and were excluded from the count, the DOH said. These laboratories contributed an average of 1.0% of tested samples and 0.9% of positive individuals in the last 14 days.
