As the country begins rolling out legal vaccines, COVID-19 cases in the country continue to rise, with over 3,000 cases reported on Friday, March 5.

The Philippines now has 587,704 cases of COVID-19 after the Department of Health (DOH) reported 3,045 new infections, the highest since October 16, 2020 – when the country logged 3,139 cases.

Meanwhile, coronavirus deaths continue to rise with 19 new fatalities, raising the death toll to 12,423. Recoveries grew by 178 to 535,207.

Of the total cases, 40,074 are active.

Only 5 testing laboratories were not able to submit their data on time.

The spike in the number of reported cases comes after DOH’s Friday announcement that it had detected 52 new cases of the South African variant in the country, pushing total infections of this virus type to 58.

Experts said that the South African variant called B1351 is more infectious than the original version of the virus and may have an impact on vaccine efficacy.

The Philippines’ daily positivity rate – or the percentage of all COVID-19 tests performed that are actually positive – also hit 9.16% on Wednesday, March 3, according to Rappler monitoring.

It was the highest rate recorded since September 18, 2020, when the country logged 9.23%.

– Rappler.com