Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 23) — The country’s COVID-19 cases slightly increased on Wednesday after the Department of Health (DOH) recorded 1,534 new cases, bringing the nationwide tally to 3,655,709.
Of the total cases, 55,449 are active or people currently sick. The active cases include 50,258 who are experiencing mild symptoms; 2,811 with moderate symptoms; 1,426 who are severe; 652 who have no symptoms; and 302 who are in critical condition.
Of the cases reported today, 1,057 occurred within the past 14 days, or from Feb. 10 to 23. The regions with the highest cases during the period were the National Capital Region with 205 cases, Central Luzon with 114, and Calabarzon with 113.
The positivity rate – or percentage of tested people with positive results – stood at 6.1% based on 24,527 tests reported on Feb. 21. This is so far the lowest positivity rate recorded this year.
The DOH also said 201 COVID-19 patients died, pushing the death toll to 55,977. There are also 2,729 new survivors, bringing the recovery count to 3,544,283.
Of the 201 deaths, 69 occurred in February, 118 in January, two in December 2021, one in November 2021, four in October 2021, and seven in September 2021. The late reporting was due to the delayed encoding of information to the COVIDKaya data storage system, the DOH explained.
The department added that 109 duplicates – including 99 recoveries – were removed from the case count while 187 cases previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
The DOH said all laboratories were operational on Feb. 21. However, two laboratories failed to submit data.
Based on data in the past 14 days, the non-reporting laboratories contribute, on average, 0.7% of samples tested and 0.7% of positive cases.
On Tuesday, the DOH logged 1,019 COVID-19 cases – the lowest single day tally of infections in the country this year – with 56,668 active cases and only 13 deaths.
