DOH reports just 1 COVID-19 death; other tallies also dip

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Health (DOH) reported only one death in its COVID-19 case bulletin on Saturday.

The country’s positivity rate also dropped to 23.3 percent — the lowest so far since the start of the year — based on 40,075 tests conducted on Thursday. It was still way above the benchmark of below 5 percent set by the World Health Organization to indicate that coronavirus transmission has been put under control.

There were 7,689 new infections, which brought the total caseload since the pandemic began to 3,601,471.

The DOH continued to report a decline in the number of active cases for more than a week now. Saturday’s count was 136,436, lower than the 151,389 the day before.

Of the active cases, 124,476 were mild, 7,069 were asymptomatic, 3,106 were moderate, 1,468 were severe and 317 were critical.

There were 22,539 new survivors added to the 3,410,821 total recoveries, or 94.7 percent of the caseload since the start of the pandemic.

Although there was one death reported on Saturday, the death toll appearing on the DOH website and Facebook page had yet to be updated at press time.

It remained at 54,214, the number on Friday when 46 deaths were added.

The DOH explained in a tweet on Saturday that the death was previously recorded in May last year “as a recovery but was reclassified as [a fatality] after final validation.”

Top regionsThe department said this was “due to the late encoding of death information to [its] COVIDKaya [data system].”

It added that “this issue is … being coordinated with the Epidemiology and Surveillance Units to ensure information is up to date.”

Central Visayas (1,022), Davao (830) and Metro Manila (748) were the top regions that had the most infections.

According to the DOH, 6,777 of the new COVID-19 cases were recorded during the last two weeks.

In terms of health-care utilization, 42 percent of intensive care unit (ICU) beds, and 40 percent each of isolation and ward beds nationwide were currently in use, together with 22 percent of the country’s ventilators.

In Metro Manila, 36 percent of ICU beds, 31 percent of isolation beds and 34 percent of ward beds were utilized, together with 20 percent of ventilators.

READ: OCTA Research: New COVID cases in most of PH back to pre-Delta surge level