MANILA - The Philippines confirmed 8,346 new cases of the disease on Sunday bringing the country’s total to 1,054,983.

The Department of Health meanwhile also reported 9,072 new recoveries, pushing the total number of Filipinos who recovered from the disease to 966,080.

This means that the country has a total of 71,472 active cases as of 4 p.m. Sunday.

Seventy seven more deaths were reported from the illness, bringing COVID-19’s death toll in the Philippines to 17,431.

The government has said that it wants to ramp up vaccination efforts, and is seeking to inoculate 70 million Filipinos by the end of the year.

ABS-CBN News however has been tracking the number of vaccinations since March, and as of April 27, only 246,986 Filipinos have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, representing just 0.35 percent of the target.

The pandemic has already caused the Philippines to plunge into its worst economic contraction since World War 2.

The Asian Development Bank said Philippine economy may grow at least 4.5 percent this year and 5.5 percent in 2022, lower than the government’s 6 percent to 7 percent target.

The country’s first COVID-19 case was a 38-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan, China.

The first COVID-19 death outside of China, was also recorded in the Philippines last year.

Worldwide, the novel coronavirus has infected more than 152.2 million people and caused over 3.19 million deaths since it was first reported in Wuhan, China in late 2019 according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

For the past several days, India has been seeing the worst number of new infections, with over 400,000 new COVID-19 cases on May 1.

The United States remains the most badly affected country with over 32 million infections and over 571,000 deaths.

India has overtaken Brazil as the second most badly affected country, with 19.5 million infections. But in terms of deaths, Brazil has recorded more fatalities than India, with the South American country reporting over 406,000 COVID-19 deaths against India’s 215,000 fatalities.

• Brazil hits record COVID-19 death toll in April

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