PH COVID-19 cases approach 3.5 million with 18,191 infections — DOH

INSIDE THE COVID WARD Health-care workers remain busy at a dedicated facility of the Philippine General Hospital (PGH). —RICHARD A. REYES

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines on Thursday is nearing the 3.5 million mark of COVID-19 infections in the country, with the addition of 18,191 new COVID-19 cases.

This pushes the caseload to 3,493,447, the Department of Health reported Thursday.

Of the total caseload, 226,521 or 6.5 percent are active cases, but most of them only have mild or no symptoms at 97.9 percent.

Most of the reported cases today or 17,625 (97 percent) occurred within the recent 14 days (January 14 – January 27).

The top regions with cases in the recent two weeks were Region 4-A (2,101 or 12 percent) and Metro Manila (2,073 or 12 percent).

There are also 22,014 recoveries to bring the number of COVID-19 survivors to 3,213,190 or 92 percent of all cases.

The total number of deaths is now at 53,736 after 74 new deaths were recorded.

The current positivity rate is now at 35.2 percent out of 61,013 tests as of January 25.

DOH said 37 duplicates were removed from the total case count including 17 recoveries and two deaths. Also, 26 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.

All labs were operational on January 25, 2022 but two laboratories were not able to submit their data to the COVID-19 Document Repository System (CDRS). Based on data in the last 14 days, the 2 labs contribute, on average, 0.3% of samples tested and 0.3% of positive individuals.