THE Philippines set a new record high in daily cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) as the Department of Health (DOH) reported 18,332 new infections on Monday, August 23, 2021.
In its case bulletin, the DOH also recorded 151 additional deaths and 13,794 new recoveries.
The new cases surpassed the 17,231 recorded on August 20 to become the highest daily count in the Philippines in this pandemic.
These brought the cumulative case count to 1,857,646. There were 321 duplicates, including 316 recoveries, that were removed from the tally.
The daily positivity rate slightly decreased to 24.9 percent from over 25 percent in the past three days. A total of 64,957 samples were tested for Sars-CoV-2 on August 21. Three laboratories did not submit their testing output to the Covid-19 Document Repository System (CDRS).
The active cases in hospitals and isolation facilities increased to a four-month high of 130,350. Of these cases, 0.6 percent were critical, 1.2 percent were severe, 0.92 percent were moderate, 94.8 percent were mild and 2.5 percent were asymptomatic.
The additional deaths, which included 68 cases that were initially tagged as recoveries, raised the death toll from Covid-19 nationwide to 31,961. The case fatality rate declined to 1.72 percent.
A total of 1,695,335 have now recovered from infection, constituting 91.3 percent of the total case count.
The number of new infections is expected to be lesser every Tuesday, when more laboratories close for the weekend. Test results are submitted to the CDRS before midnight of each day. The data is sent to the DOH epidemiological surveillance system CovidKaya.
The DOH technical team extracts the data from CovidKaya the next day and validated cases are reported in the DOH case bulletin after another day.
DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire earlier said the cases were expected to increase further.
Transmission is believed to be driven by the highly contagious Delta variant of Sars-CoV-2 and the other variants of concern Alpha and Beta.
The DOH earlier Monday confirmed community transmission of the Delta variant in Calabarzon and National Capital Region, which have the two biggest populations among the regions at over 14 million and around 13 million, respectively. (Marites Villamor-Ilano / SunStar Philippines)