FILE – Residents of Imus Cavite avail of the free COVID-19 antigen tests offered by the OVP’s Swab Cab initiative. PHOTO BY JAY GANZON / OVP
MANILA, Philippines — For the fourth consecutive day, the country registered over 8,000 new COVID-19 cases as the Department of Health (DOH) reported 8,167 new infections on Monday, leading to an active case count of 62,615.
DOH’s COVID-19 bulletin showed that the active cases went down slightly from Sunday’s 63,646 only because of a high number of recoveries on Monday, at 9,095.
This brings the total recovery count to 1,515,054, which is 94.4 percent of the total confirmed cases in the Philippines which is now at 1,605,762.
On Sunday, DOH recorded 8,735 new cases; before this, new infections were at 8,562 and 8,147 for Friday and Saturday, respectively.
Most of the patients or 93.9 percent of active cases have still exhibited mild symptoms only, while 1.3 percent were asymptomatic. At least 2.1 percent of the patients currently have severe symptoms while 1.2 percent are in critical condition.
Of the 50,601 tests conducted from July 31, DOH said that 15.7 percent tested positive.
The DOH has yet to categorically say that the sudden increase in COVID-19 cases can be attributed to the more transmissible Delta variant, but analytics group OCTA Research speculated last week that seven percent of the country’s active patients may already be carrying the Delta variant.
Earlier, OCTA Research warned that a community transmission may already be happening in Metro Manila.
Due to the Delta variant’s threat, the national government has already decided to put Metro Manila under an enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) from August 6 to August 20.
In terms of COVID-19 bed capacity in the National Capital Region, 55 percent of intensive care unit beds are being utilized while 48 percent of isolation beds are occupied — a slight upward trend since Friday when utilization rates were only 52 percent and 44 percent, respectively.
About 60 percent of ICU beds for COVID-19 patients are occupied all over the country, while 50 percent of isolation beds are being used.
DOH said that one laboratory was not operational last July 31, while three other labs were not able to submit their data to the COVID-19 Document Repository System.
Based on the data from the last 14 days, the four laboratories that were not able to submit data accounted for 1.5 percent of all the samples tested, and 1.0 percent of all the positive cases.
There were also 94 duplicate entries removed from the total case count, of which 20 are recoveries. Also, 19 cases previously classified as recovered patients were placed back to the active case count after validation.