MANILA - (UPDATE) The Philippines confirmed 3,372 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday bringing the country’s total to 261,216.

The Department of Health also reported 20,472 new recoveries, as the DOH implemented its weekly “mass recovery” pushing the total number of Filipinos who recovered from the disease to 207,568.

This meant that the country has a total of 49,277 active cases as of 4 p.m. Sunday.

Seventy nine more deaths were reported from the illness, bringing COVID-19’s death toll in the Philippines to 4,371.

The DOH meanwhile insisted that it strives “to keep the media and the public updated with the most accurate national tally available at the moment.”

This was after ABS-CBN pointed out on Saturday that scores of COVID-19 cases previously reported as recoveries turned out to be deaths after final validation.

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

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 28.76 million individuals since it first emerged in Wuhan, China in 2019, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. It has also killed more than 970,000 despite strict lockdowns implemented to try and contain it.

The United States is the most severely affected country in the world with over 6.48 million infections and over 193,000 deaths. The US is followed by India and Brazil, in terms of number of infections. Brazil however has reported more fatalities than India.