Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 16) — The country recorded 2,671 new COVID-19 infections on Wednesday, bringing the nationwide tally to 3,644,597, the Department of Health’s latest bulletin showed.
Of the total cases, 68,829 are currently ill. Among them are 63,037 with mild symptoms; 2,920 experiencing moderate symptoms; 1,433 in severe condition; 1,130 with no symptoms; and 309 who are critical.
Meanwhile, the positivity rate, or percentage of tested people with positive results, stood at 9.6% based on 25,629 tests reported on Feb. 14. This is so far the lowest positivity rate recorded this year.
The department also reported that 77 more patients died of COVID-19, raising the death toll to 55,223. The recovery count also rose to 3,520,545 after 6,130 more patients got well.
The DOH said all laboratories were operational on Feb. 14. However, six laboratories failed to submit their data to the COVID-19 Document Repository System. Based on data in the last 14 days, the non-reporting laboratories contribute, on average, 1.4% of samples tested and 1.7% of positive cases.
Of the new cases reported, 2,610 occurred within the last 14 days from Feb. 3 to Feb. 16. The regions with most cases during the period were the National Capital Region with 622 cases, Calabarzon with 323 cases, and Central Luzon with 287 cases.
Of the new reported deaths, 32 occurred this month and 16 in January. The rest were fatalities from 2021— six in December, nine in November, five in October, three in September, five in August, and one in May. The late reporting was due to the delayed encoding of information to the COVIDKaya data storage system, the DOH explained.
The department said that 14 duplicates were removed from the total case count. Of these, 12 are recoveries.
It added that 62 cases previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
