Phl records 26,303 single-day high

The Philippines recorded on Saturday a new single-day high 26,303 coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) infections, trumping previous records since the pandemic started early last year.

The big jump was blamed on late results from two laboratories being added to the day’s tally. The previous highest daily count was recorded on Thursday at 22,820.

According to the Department of Health (DoH), the new cases brought the nationwide caseload to 2,206,021 with active cases at 185,706.

The DoH said that of the cases, 85 percent were mild, 10.2 percent were asymptomatic, 1.3 percent were severe and 0.6 percent were in critical condition.

Of the 26,303 new cases, 1,608 should have been included in the September 10 data update, the health department clarified.

“While some technical issues have been resolved by DICT (Department of Information and Communications), there are CDRS (Covid Document Repository System) data not yet included in CK and remain unavailable for extraction,” the DoH said in a statement.

“This has led to some delays in the inclusion of new data for cases, deaths, and recoveries,” it added.

“While we await full resolution of this issue, we may observe some delays in inclusion of some data in our topline numbers in the coming days but we are managing this by generating data from CDRS and submitted line lists by our disease reporting units.”

A report by the Philippine News Agency cited the DoH also announcing that total recoveries climbed to 1,985,337 after 16,013 more patients recovered from the illness.

Meanwhile, 79 new fatalities brought the death toll to 34,978. A total of 52 duplicate cases were also removed from the total case count.

“Moreover, 32 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation,” the DoH said.

On 9 September, the Philippines was also able to test 75,688 individuals, of whom 27.6 percent tested positive for the illness.