Health workers administer swab tests on patients during the Office of the Vice President’s Swab Cab event. Image from Facebook / Vice President Leni Robredo
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines logged 37,070 additional coronavirus infections on Monday, pushing the country’s total case count to over 3.24 million, with over 290,000 currently sick with COVID-19.
While not the highest single-day tally since the start of the pandemic, Monday’s caseload is still one of the highest recorded by the Department of Health (DOH), with a 46-percent positivity rate of the 77,410 tests conducted.
Currently, there are 290,938 active cases of COVID-19 in the country, according to the DOH bulletin.
The DOH, meanwhile, recorded 33,940 recoveries and 23 deaths.
“Sa kabuuang bilang ng mga naitalang kaso sa bansa, 9.0% (290,938) ang aktibong kaso, 89.4% (2,898,507) na ang gumaling, at 1.63% (52,929) ang namatay,” the DOH said.
According to the DOH, 36,001 of the 37,070 new cases occurred within the past 14 days.
Metro Manila recorded the most number of new cases on Monday, with 13,061 infections.
The nation’s capital was followed by Region 4-A with 9,048 new cases and Region 3 with 4,173 more infections.
On Saturday, the country posted an all-time high of 39,004 coronavirus cases.
Deaths
The DOH also noted that 20 of the 23 deaths reported on Monday happened this month, one in September 2021, one in April and one in September 2020.
The DOH attributed the delayed reporting on some of the fatalities due to the “late encoding of death information to COVIDKaya”
“This issue is currently being coordinated with the Epidemiology and Surveillance Units to ensure information is up to date,” it assured.
Meanwhile, the DOH said 94 duplicates were removed from the total case count. Of these, 64 are recoveries and one is a death.
Further, two cases that were previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
The DOH said 12 labs were not able to submit their data to the COVID-19 Document Repository System.
“Based on data in the last 14 days, the 12 labs contribute, on average, 5.1% of samples tested and 5.1% of positive individuals,” the DOH said.