Covid-19 deaths hit 30,000 as cases continue steep climb

WITH the highly contagious Delta and two other variants of concern sweeping the country, new cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) climbed further on Saturday, August 14, 2021, to go past 14,000 in a day, while deaths jumped past 30,000.

The Department of Health (DOH) case bulletin listed 14,249 new infections, 233 additional deaths and 11,714 recoveries on Saturday.

The daily positivity rate increased further to 24.9 percent of 52,679 tests conducted on August 12, which means that one of every four individuals tested was positive for Sars-CoV-2.

Four laboratories were unable to submit their testing data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System on August 12, hence, the relatively lower output.

This latest daily case count is the second highest after the 15, 310 recorded on April 2, 2021. The latter, however, included a backlog of 3,709 cases that were not counted on March 31 due to a technical issue in the CovidKaya surveillance system.

Including the new infections, the cumulative Covid-19 case count increased to 1,727,231. The DOH said 320 duplicates, including 313 recoveries and one death, were removed from the tally.

Of the total, 98,847 or 5.7 percent were active cases in hospitals and isolation facilities, including 14 cases that were reclassified from r ecover i es.

The additional deaths, which included 142 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries but were found to have died, raised the death toll to 30,070.

Deaths exceeded 200 for the second consecutive day, although the case fatality rate remained at 1.74 percent.

The new recoveries brought the total to 1,598,314, or 92.5 percent of the case count.

Among the active cases, 0.8 percent were critical, 1.4 percent were severe, 0.95 percent were moderate, 95.9 percent were mild and 1.0 percent were asymptomatic.

The DOH earlier said the Philippines is now categorized as high risk.

The Delta variant (B.1.617.2), which has been found to be the most transmissible among the variants of concern, has affected 14 regions, 24 provinces, 30 cities and the entire National Capital Region.

All 17 regions also have cases with either the Alpha (B.1.1.7) or Beta (B.1.351) variants while the P.3, a variant that emerged in Central Visayas, has spread to 14 regions. (Marites Villamor-Ilano with HDT)