MANILA - (UPDATE) The Philippines confirmed 2,839 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday bringing the country’s total to 237,365.

The Department of Health also reported 23,074 new recoveries, as the DOH implemented “time-based mass recoveries” pushing the total number of Filipinos who recovered from the disease to 184,687.

This meant that the country has a total of 48,803 active cases as of 4 p.m. Sunday.

Eighty five more deaths were reported from the illness, bringing COVID-19’s death toll in the Philippines to 3,875.

The National Capital Region had the most number of new cases at 1,170, followed by the provinces of Negros Occidental, Laguna, Cavite and Rizal.

The Philippines has the highest number of total cases in Southeast Asia despite implementing the longest and strictest lockdown in the region.

Metro Manila and nearby provinces are starting to flatten the COVID-19 pandemic curve, a mathematics professor from the University of the Philippines said Sunday.

An official from the National Task Force against the pandemic said Sunday that the government aims to flatten the COVID-19 curve by end of September, or 7 months after the first infection was reported in the Philippines.

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

Worldwide, the novel coronavirus has infected 26.9 million individuals since it first emerged in Wuhan, China in 2019. It has also killed more than 879,000 despite strict lockdowns implemented to try and contain it.

The United States is the most severely affected country in the world with over 6.2 million infections and over 188,000 deaths. The US is followed by Brazil and India, both in terms of number of infections and fatalities.