MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Health (DOH) said it had recorded 11,995 cases of COVID-19 from October 17 to 23, lower than the previous week’s infections.
In its latest weekly report on Monday, DOH said this translated to a daily average of 1,714, which was 22 percent lower than what was recorded from October 10 to 16, at 2,188, where the DOH registered a total of 15,314 infections.
Four or 0.04 percent of the total cases were tagged as severe or critical, bringing the active number of severe or critical cases to 650.
An additional 272 deaths were added to the country’s COVID-19 death toll — 26 of which occurred from October 10 to October 23, while the rest were backlogs recorded as early as April 2021.
With the decrease in registered cases, the non-ICU utilization rate slightly decreased from 26.8 to 26.4 percent. On the other hand, ICU-utilization rate also decreased from 25 to 23.1 percent.
Meanwhile, in terms of the progress in vaccination efforts, fully-vaccinated individuals slightly increased to 73,482,574 (94.09 percent of the target population) after 85,137 additional individuals were vaccinated in the past week.
On the other hand, individuals with booster shots now total 20,472,983 after 152,402 additional individuals were inoculated in the same period.
This total comes amid the detection of the XBB Omicron subvariant and XBC variant of COVID-19 — believed to be more transmissible than its other counterparts.
The XBB coronavirus subvariant is said to be highly immune-evasive and is pointed as the leading cause of the recent surge in Singapore.
The XBC virus, on the other hand, has been classified by the United Kingdom Health Security Agency as a variant under monitoring and investigation.