THE Department of Health (DOH) on Wednesday, August 25, 2021, reported over 13,000 new cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) despite the lower testing output as well as more than 200 additional mortalities that pushed the death toll in just the last two weeks past 3,000.
From August 12 to 25, a total of 3,118 mortalities were added to the Covid-19 death toll. Including the tally for August 1 to 11, the partial death toll for August 2021 has reached 4,603, higher than the 4,053 deaths recorded in the entire first quarter (Q1) from January to March 2021.
In its case bulletin Wednesday, the DOH listed 13,573 new infections, 228 additional deaths and 15,820 recoveries.
The August 25 daily tally, which was the second lowest in the last seven days from August 19, brought the cumulative case count to 1,883,088. The DOH said 176 duplicates were removed from the tally.
The daily positivity rate increased again to 25.5 percent, the second highest since the DOH began reporting this indicator. Only 46,193 tests were conducted on Monday, August 23.
The additional deaths, which included 152 cases that were initially tagged as recoveries, raised the death toll to 32,492. The case fatality rate remained at 1.73 percent.
Covid-19 deaths nationwide were on a downtrend in July, but climbed as infections also increased sharply.
The new recoveries brought the total to 1,725,218, which constitute 91.6 percent of the Covid-19 case count nationwide.
As more recoveries were reported than new cases for two straight days, the number of active cases declined further to 125,378, of which 0.6 percent were critical, 1.2 percent were severe, 0.94 percent were moderate, 95.9 percent were mild and 1.3 percent were asymptomatic. (Marites Villamor-Ilano / SunStar Philippines)