MANILA - The Philippines on Thursday registered 5,221 more COVID-19 infections, with active cases reaching over 45,000, the health department announced.

The country now has 1,490,665 total recorded coronavirus cases, of which 45,495 or 3.1 percent are active, the Department of Health's (DOH) latest bulletin showed.

The day's positivity rate is at 10.2 percent, based from the testing results of 48,069 individuals who got screened for the virus on Tuesday.

This marked the 9th straight day that the positivity rate stood below 11 percent, ABS-CBN's Data Analytics team said, but it is still twice higher than the World Health Organization's (WHO) 5 percent benchmark for at least 2 weeks.

A high number of people testing positive for COVID-19 means more testing should be done, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

COVID-related deaths increased by 82 to 26,314, placing the country's case fatality rate at 1.77 percent.

Thursday's fresh fatalities included 46 cases initially tagged as recoveries, the DOH said.

Meanwhile, there were 4,147 more recoveries from the respiratory disease, the fewest in almost a week or since July 9, according to the ABS-CBN Investigative and Research Group, when the DOH posted 3,003 new recoveries.

This brings the total number of recuperations to 1,418,856, accounting for 95.2 percent of the country's running tally.

A total of 52 cases first classified as recoveries were revalidated to be active infections.

Thirteen duplicates, 10 of which are recoveries, were also excluded from the running tally, said the DOH.

Four laboratories failed to submit data on time.

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