COVID-19 testing (Photo from the Facebook of Vice President Leni Robredo)
MANILA, Philippines — COVID-19 infections continued to slow down nationwide as the Department of Health (DOH) recorded 1,223 new cases on Saturday.
In its 4 p.m. daily bulletin, the DOH said 1,179 or 96 percent of the new COVID-19 cases occurred from Feb. 13 to Feb. 26.
The regions with the most cases were Metro Manila with 271 cases or 23 percent, Western Visayas with 159 cases or 13 percent, and Calabarzon with 152 cases or 13 percent.
The DOH also reported 2,400 new recoveries and 128 additional deaths. Of the 128 deaths, 25 occurred in February and 28 in January this year; while last year, there were two in December, five in November, 35 in October, and 33 in September.
The DOH said this was “due to late encoding of death information” in the COVIDKaya system.
“This issue is currently being coordinated with the epidemiology and surveillance units to ensure information is up to date,” the agency said.
1,671 new cases
On Friday, the DOH recorded 1,671 additional cases, 1,586 recoveries, and 59 deaths.
In 2022, the lowest daily infection was recorded on Feb. 22 at 1,019 additional infections.
Four laboratories were unable to submit their data to the COVID-19 Document Repository System. Their data accounted for 2.6 percent of all the tested samples and 0.8 percent of the positive results.
The DOH also recorded a positivity rate of 5.3 percent out of 26,631 who were tested for the disease.
So far, the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country has reached 3,660,020, of which 3,549,735 or 97 percent recovered while 56,351 or 1.54 percent died.
The DOH said almost 91.7 percent of the cases were mild or asymptomatic infections.
Ninety-five duplicate cases were removed from the total count, of which 80 were recoveries, one case was tagged as death, while 113 cases previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
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PH posts 1,223 new COVID-19 cases; total case count now 3,660,020