Of the newly reported cases, 1,179 (96%) occurred within the past 14 days or from Feb. 13 to 26. The regions with the highest number of new cases in that period were Metro Manila (271 or 23%), Western Visayas (159 or 13%) and Calabarzon (152 or 13%).
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 26) — The Department of Health (DOH) reported 1,223 new COVID-19 infections on Saturday, pushing the nationwide tally to 3,660,020.
Of the total, 53,934 or 1.5% are active cases or currently sick patients. At least 48,842 active cases have mild symptoms; 2,780 are in moderate condition; 1,417 have severe symptoms; 597 have no symptoms; and 298 are in critical condition.
The death toll jumped to 56,351—1.54% of all cases—after 128 more people lost their lives. Among the 128 deaths, 25 (20%) occurred this month and 28 (22%) last month. There were also 75 traced to last year: two in December, five in November, 35 in October, and 33 in September.
Meanwhile, 2,400 others got better, raising the recovery count to 3,549,735 or 97% of the infection tally.
Four laboratories did not submit data, the DOH added. These laboratories contributed an average of 2.6% of tested samples and 0.8% of positive individuals in the last 14 days.
The belated reporting is due to late encoding of data to the COVIDKaya data storage system, the DOH explained.
The DOH said it reclassified 113 initially tagged survivors as among the dead after validation and deleted 95 duplicate cases, including 80 recoveries and one fatality.
The positivity rate, or percentage of tested people with positive results, dropped further to 5.3% based on 26,631 tests reported on Feb. 27.
The World Health Organization recommends positivity rates to fall below 5% before countries reopen borders.
