Philippines’ COVID-19 tally tops 356,000

The country’s COVID-19 caseload breached 356,000 on Sunday, October 18, following the addition of 2,379 confirmed cases, announced the Department of Health (DOH).

With these new cases from all except 14 testing laboratories, total coronavirus cases in the Philippines now stand at 356,618.

Of the new cases, 1,580 occurred within the last two weeks, while the rest were from before that period.

Quezon City contributed the most number of new cases on Sunday, with 172, followed by Rizal, with 147; Bulacan, 136; Caloocan City, 117; and Cavite, 101.

Not counting deaths and recoveries, 39,808 are active cases, which is 11% of the country’s total cases. Out of the active cases, 82.8% have mild symptoms, 11.5% are asymptomatic, 1.9% have severe symptoms, and 3.7% are critical.

The percentage of severe cases is a bit higher than last week’s 1.8%, but the rate of critical cases inched lower from the 3.9% reported a week ago.

The DOH also recorded 14,941 new recoveries on Sunday. Most of these 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.

This brought the total number of recoveries in the Philippines to 310,158.

Meanwhile, deaths due to COVID-19 rose to 6,652, after 50 new deaths were reported.

Among these fatalities, 18 took place in October, 14 in September, 8 in August, and 10 from June to July.

In addition, 31 of these fatalities were from Metro Manila, while the rest were from the following regions:

• Central Luzon – 7
• Calabarzon – 5
• Western Visayas – 2
• Mimaropa – 2
• Ilocos Region – 1
• Davao Region – 1
• Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao – 1

The DOH also reported that 99 duplicates, including 84 recovered cases and 1 death, were removed from the tallies. Then, 11 cases previously reported as recoveries were found to be deaths after further validation. – Rappler.com