Philippines overtakes Saudi Arabia, ranks 18th worldwide in COVID-19 cases

The Philippines’ COVID-19 caseload breached 339,000 on Sunday, October 11, with around 2,500 more confirmed infections added to the tally.

The Department of Health (DOH) announced a total of 339,341 coronavirus cases in the country, after 2,502 new cases were reported by all but 15 testing laboratories.

With this, the Philippines now ranks 18th worldwide in terms of number of coronavirus cases, overtaking Saudi Arabia which reported 339,267 total cases as of Sunday, according to its health ministry as tracked by the website worldometers.info.

Daily new cases in the Philippines have remained at the 2,000 level for the 7th straight day. The 7-day average of newly reported cases has also stayed below 3,000 since September 24.

Of the new cases in the Philippines on Sunday, 2,106 occurred within the last two weeks, while the rest were from before that period.

Metro Manila still has the most number of new cases, with 782, followed by nearby provinces Rizal, with 141; Laguna, 128; Cavite, 125; and Bulacan, 119.

Excluding deaths and recoveries, 39,945 are active cases, of which 83% have mild symptoms, 11.2% are asymptomatic, 1.8% are in severe condition, and 3.9% are critical.

Same as the milestone reached last week, this week’s total active cases is the lowest since August 3, when there were 38,405 active cases. However, the percentage of severe and critical cases inched up from last week’s 1.7% and 3.8%, respectively.

Sunday also saw 17,057 new recoveries, most of which are due to the DOH’s weekly Oplan Recovery scheme, where mild and asymptomatic cases are tagged as recoveries based on time-based and symptoms-based discharging criteria.

The total number of recoveries in the Philippines now stands at 293,075.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 death toll also increased to 6,321, with 83 new deaths reported.

Among these fatalities, 24 took place in October, 21 in September, 23 in August, 9 in July, and 6 from March to June.

In addition, 39 of these fatalities were from Metro Manila, while at least 2 deaths were from the following regions:

• Calabarzon – 17
• Western Visayas – 10
• Northern Mindanao – 5
• Central Luzon – 4
• Ilocos Region – 2
• Central Visayas – 2

There were also two deaths among repatriates, while Eastern Visayas and Caraga reported one death each.

The DOH also said 87 duplicates, including 35 recovered cases, were removed from the tallies. In addition, 41 cases previously reported as recoveries were found to be deaths after further validation. – Rappler.com