Residents of Imus, Cavite take advantage of free antigen tests against COVID-19. Photo by Jay Ganzon / OVP
MANILA, Philippines — The country’s active COVID-19 case shot back to over 60,000 as of Friday, as the Department of Health (DOH) recorded 8,562 new infections.
According to DOH’s COVID-19 bulletin, Friday’s 61,920 active cases represent 3.9 percent of the total number of infections recorded, which was at 1,580,824.
A lower than usual number of new recoveries was recorded, only at 2,854. This means that 94.3 percent of the total case count or 1,491,182 have recovered from the disease.
The last time that the country recorded a daily tally reaching eight thousand cases was last April 26, with 8,445, based on the DOH COVID tracker. At that time, however, the DOH only reported 5,651 new cases owing to delays in reporting by laboratories.
For Friday’s tally, most of the patients or 94.0 percent of active cases have exhibited only mild symptoms, while 1.2 percent were asymptomatic. At least 2.1 percent of the patients currently have severe symptoms while 1.2 percent are in critical condition.
DOH said that of the 52,623 tests conducted from July 28, DOH said that 14.9 percent tested positive.
It is not clear whether the stark increase in cases could be attributed to the more infectious COVID-19 Delta variant, but the national government has already decided to put Metro Manila under an enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) from August 6 to August 20.
Compared to previous weeks, active case count remained below 60,000 and even went lower than 50,000. Just this Thursday, active case count was at 56,273, while new cases was at 5,735.
Last Wednesday, analytics group OCTA Research speculated that seven percent of the country’s active patients may already be carrying the Delta variant.
In terms of COVID-19 bed capacity in the National Capital Region, 52 percent of intensive care unit beds are being utilized while 44 percent of isolation beds are occupied. All over the country, 59 percent of ICU beds for COVID-19 patients are occupied, while 50 percent of isolation beds are being used.
DOH said that all laboratories were operational last July 28, but two labs were not able to submit their data to the COVID-19 Document Repository System.
Also, based on the data from the last 14 days, the five laboratories that did not submit data accounted for 0.5 percent of all the samples tested, and 0.4 percent of all the positive cases.