WITH six non-reporting laboratories, new coronavirus infections dipped but remained above 16,000 for the third day in a row.
The daily death toll from coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), meanwhile, exceeded 200 for the fourth consecutive day.
In its case bulletin Sunday, August 22, 2021, the Department of Health (DOH) reported 16,044 new cases, 215 additional deaths and 13,952 new recoveries.
For the third straight day, the daily positivity rate was more than 25 percent, translating to one positive result for every four tests conducted.
A total of 65,583 samples were tested on August 20, of which 25.5 percent yielded positive results.
The new infections brought the cumulative case count to 1,839,635. There were 460 duplicates, including 427 recovers and one death, that were removed from the count.
The additional deaths, which included 120 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries but were found to be deaths, raised the Covid-19 death toll in the country to 31,810. The case fatality rate remained at 1.73 percent.
A total of 1,681,925 persons have now recovered from infection, comprising 91.4 percent of the total case count.
There were still 125,900 active cases as of Sunday, of which 0.6 percent were critical, 1.2 percent were severe, 0.94 percent were moderate, 93.8 percent were mild and 3.4 percent were asymptomatic.
In the recent two weeks to August 21, the DOH Covid-19 tracker showed that Cavite had the highest number of new cases among the provinces and cities.
Cavite had 12,807 new cases in the last 14 days, followed by Laguna with 9,065 cases, Bulacan with 8,788, Quezon City with 8,027 and City of Manila with 5,359.
Among the regions, the National Capital Region (NCR) continued to have the highest 14-day tally with 43,134 new cases, followed by Calabarzon with 31,761, Central Luzon with 20,768, Central Visayas with 10,617 and Western Visayas with 7,229.
These are among the 14 regions in the country which have cases of the Delta variant of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
Globally, more than 211.4 million people have been infected, with over 4.4 million deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker. (Marites Villamor-Ilano / SunStar Philippines)