DOH: 8,162 new COVID-19 cases but active infections steadily going down

(FILE) A health employee of the Pagadian City government swabs a passenger from Manila on April 7 for coronavirus disease testing before entering the city. The test is provided free by the local government. Photo by Leah D. Agonoy, Inquirer Mindanao

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Health (DOH) reported an additional 8,162 new COVID-19 infections on Sunday, April 25.

But despite the still high daily count, active COVID-19 cases are steadily going down due to the high recovery rate.  As of Sunday, active cases were at 77,075, while 20,509 new recoveries brought the total recovery count to 903,665.

However, 109 new deaths pushed the death toll to 16,783.

With the new cases, the country inched closer to the one million mark for confirmed COVID-19 cases at 997,523.

Most of the patients or 95.56 percent of active cases have mild symptoms, while 1.5 percent were asymptomatic.  At least 1.2 percent of the patients have severe symptoms while 1 percent of the patients are in critical condition.

Of the 47,970 tests conducted from April 23, the DOH said 16.7 percent tested positive.  In terms of COVID-19 bed capacity in the National Capital Region which is still reeling from the recent surge, 72 percent of intensive care unit beds have been utilized while 58 percent of isolation beds are occupied.

The DOH said that 19 duplicate entries were removed from the total case count, of which 13 are recoveries. Also, 52 cases previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after validation.

Two laboratories were not operational last Friday, while eight others were not able to submit their data to the COVID-19 Document Repository System (CDRS).

/MUF