‘Relatively low’ 12,700 new COVID-19 cases due to glitch

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Health (DOH) said on Wednesday that “relatively low numbers’’ were added to the country’s tally of COVID-19 cases due to a technical glitch.

The agency recorded 12,751 new infections and explained that “due to technical issues encountered in the extraction of updated data from COVID-Kaya last Sept 7, 2021, relatively low numbers are reported today.’’

The latest figure raised the country’s total case count to 2,134,005.

The technical problem was being resolved with the Department of Information and Communications Technology. Once fixed, the DOH said, expect “higher numbers’’ in the next few days.

For four consecutive days until Monday, the government’s daily COVID count exceeded 20,000 cases. It slightly dipped to 18,012 on Tuesday.

Positivity rate

There are now 151,135 active cases, of which 91.6 percent are mild, 3.7 percent are asymptomatic, 0.7 percent are critical, 1.5 percent are severe, and 2.5 percent are moderate.

Another 20,151 patients have recovered from the disease, bringing the total number of survivors to 1,948,198.

However, 174 more COVID patients died, raising the nationwide death toll to 34,672.

The positivity rate in the country continued to climb, hitting 28.1 percent or 16,191.2 of the 57,620 people last tested.

The World Health Organization said the positivity rate in an area should be below 5 percent for the infection to be considered under control.

—PATRICIA DENISE M. CHIU