MANILA (UPDATE) - The Philippines confirmed 7,174 new cases of the disease on Sunday bringing the country’s total to 1,101,990.

The Department of Health meanwhile also reported 9,197 new recoveries, pushing the total number of Filipinos who recovered from the disease to 1,022,224.

This means that the country has a total of 61,294 active cases as of 4 p.m. Sunday. This was the lowest number of active cases since March 16.

Two hundred four more deaths were reported from the illness, bringing COVID-19’s death toll in the Philippines to 18,472. This was the highest number of recorded deaths per day since April 12 this year. Of the day’s total, 149 were previously tagged as recoveries.

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.

• OCTA flags surge in COVID-19 cases in some southern cities

ABS-CBN News however has been tracking the number of vaccinations since March, and as of May 4, only 320, 586 Filipinos have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, representing just 0.46 percent of the target.

• Philippines: COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker

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 157.7 million people and caused over 3.28 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 22.3 million infections. But in terms of deaths, Brazil has recorded more fatalities than India, with the South American country reporting over 421,000 COVID-19 deaths against India’s 242,000 fatalities.

• Brazil hits record COVID-19 death toll in April

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