People walk in the business district of Makati City on March 3, 2022 as the Philippines eases quarantine rules, with many workers returning to work. Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News/file
MANILA (UPDATED) —The Philippines on Saturday recorded 941 new COVID-19 cases, as the positivity rate fell to 3.8 percent, the lowest so far this year.
The 3.8 percent positivity rate is the lowest since December 26, 2021, ABS-CBN Data Analytics Team head Edson Guido said.
This is based on samples of 26,737 individuals on March 3, according on the Department of Health's latest bulletin. Only one laboratory failed to submit data, the agency added.
This raised the total confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country to 3,666,678 of which 49,374 or 1.3 percent remained active and now below 50,000 for the first time since January 5.
Ten duplicates, all tagged as recoveries, were removed from the total case count, while 96 cases previously tagged as recuperations were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
Of those still battling the disease, 44,586 were mild cases, 2,736 were moderate cases, 1,344 were severe cases, 416 were asymptomatic, and 292 were critical cases.
The intensive care unit (ICU) bed utilization rate in Metro Manila and nationwide remained at 25 percent.
About 833 or 89 percent of the newly reported cases occurred within the past 14 days. Metro Manila (223 cases), Calabarzon (124 cases) and Central Visayas (80 cases) were the top regions with cases in the recent two weeks.
The death toll, however, reached 56,879, as the health department recorded 109 new deaths. Meanwhile, 1,784 more individuals recovered from the disease, bringing the number of recovered to 3,560,425.
The DOH reported the following number of deaths:
- 11 occurred in March 2022
- 59 in February 2022
- 24 in January 2022
- 1 in October 2021
- 2 in September 2021
- 5 in August 2021
- 1 in July 2021
- 5 in June 2021
- 1 in May 2021
This came a couple of days before the health department planned to scrap daily announcements of confirmed COVID-19 cases, as the agency prepares to focus its data reports on critically ill patients to be published weekly from March 7.
Metro Manila and 38 other areas de-escalated to the lowest level of a 5-tier COVID-19 alert system, as experts tallied downtrends in coronavirus case counts.
The Philippines recently reported an average of less than 1,000 daily cases the past week, Guido said, describing it as the lowest since December 30, 2021.
Government data shows that the country has so far fully vaccinated 63 million people, while 62 million more have received their first dose. Of the fully vaccinated individuals, some 10 million have taken their booster jabs.