MANILA — The Philippines logged a record-high number of new COVID-19 recoveries at 116 on Friday, bringing the total number of recovered patients to 1,734.

This is the second day that the country broke the record for the number of new coronavirus recoveries.

The Department of Health (DOH) bulletin also recorded 120 new COVID-19 cases, substantially lower than the more than 300 new cases the day before.

Majority or 70 percent of the new cases are from the National Capital Region while 28 or 23 percent are from Region 7. The rest are from other regions.

• READ: PH logs 339 new COVID-19 cases, more than half from Reg. 7

For the past several days, Region 7, which includes Cebu, has been recording relatively high numbers of cases. The DOH has attributed this to an increase in COVID-19 patients inside jails.

• READ: DOH closely monitoring COVID-19 clusters in Cebu, Zamboanga jails

The 120 new cases on Friday is the lowest since April 25.

Since the pandemic started, there have been 10,463 COVID-19 cases in the Philippines.

The DOH also reported 11 new coronavirus-related deaths, the lowest since May 3. This brings the total number of fatalities to 696.

“Ating makikita na unti unti nang nagfa-flatten ang curve,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said during a televised briefing, referring to measures that help slow down the spread of the virus in the country.

(We can see that we are slowly flattening the curve.)

She said the improving situation is evident in the lower “positivity rate” or the number of individuals testing positive against the total number of individuals tested.

She said that back in April 6, the positivity rate was at 17 percent after 4,144 people tested positive out of 24,755.

But by May 6, the positivity rate was down to 10 percent: 13,405 out of the total 131,786 people tested were confirmed positive.

“Ang pagbaba ng positivity rate ang isa sa naging basehan para masabi na nagfa-flatten na ang curve,” she said.

(The decrease in the positivity rate is one of the bases for saying that we are flattening the curve.)

Worldwide, there have been 3.8. million COVID-19 cases, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus dashboard. Of those, almost 1.3 million people have recovered from the disease while almost 270,000 have died.