MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Health (DOH) registered 17,145 infections from August 29 to September 4, slightly lower than the number recorded the week before.
As a result, the daily average was 2,449 — 10 percent lower than the week before at 2,752, based on the DOH’s weekly data.
Meanwhile, 40 or 0.28 percent of the total cases were tagged as severe or critical, bringing the active number of severe or critical cases to 768.
DOH said 354 fatalities were added to the COVID-19 death toll — only one died in September but 145 in August. All the rest were backlogs from July 2021 to July 2022.
Despite the decrease in cases, the non-ICU-bed utilization rate slightly increased from 28.1 percent to 29.3, ICU-bed utilization rate, on the other hand, decreased further from 24.9 percent to 23.5 percent.
Regarding vaccination progress, fully-vaccinated individuals slightly increased to 72,620,347 (92.98 percent of the target population) after 143,737 additional individuals received vaccinations in the past week.
On the other hand, individuals with booster shots now total 18,194,645 after 351,297 additional individuals received vaccinations in the same period.
Based on the DOH COVID-19 tracker, as of September 4, there are currently 24,067 active COVID-19 infections nationwide.
The DOH previously noted that 60 percent of severe and critical cases of COVID-19 are unvaccinated or partially vaccinated individuals.