The Department of Health (DOH) on Saturday said it recorded 6,979 new cases of COVID-19 infections, bringing the country’s total tally to 1,094,849 cases.
In its daily case bulletin, the DOH said there were 63,376 active cases, 94.1 percent of which were mild, 2 percent asymptomatic, 1.6 percent severe cases, 1.2 percent critical cases and 1.04 percent moderate cases.
There are 10,179 patients who recently recovered from the disease, boosting the total number of survivors to 1,013,204, but there were also 170 new deaths, pushing the total death toll to 18,269.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire noted during the Laging Handa public briefing that there had been a drop in the reported number of new cases daily but the DOH was still trying to determine the cause.
She said the fewer cases in previous weeks was not due to the laboratories since they had been submitting results daily to the DOH.
“It’s about the samples that are received by the laboratories. They are able to submit [results] regularly, every day to the (DOH). But if we look at the samples submitted to them for processing for (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) these have decreased,” she said.
“We are observing if this is due to the cases decreasing or if we were just unable to test more people,” she said.
She noted that in the week of April 23 to 29, laboratories were able to test 374,000 samples.
In the week of April 30 to May 6, the number of samples tested went down to 342,000, she said.
The number of individuals tested also went down by 10 percent, she said.
Since late April, the DOH has been reporting fewer than 10,000 COVID-19 cases per day.
Vergeire also said there had been a gradual decline in hospital admissions especially in the National Capital Region.
She said the utilization rate of intensive care unit beds had gone down to about 68 percent.
“But we still could not be complacent because of this, as we see that the average daily attack rate nationwide is at 7.8 and for NCR it is still 25,” she said, meaning Metro Manila is still considered to be at high risk, she said.
This is one of the factors that would be checked to determine if the quarantine classification would be deescalated or retained, she said.