MANILA (UPDATE) — The Department of Health (DOH) on Tuesday reported 2,093 additional COVID-19 cases, or a total of 326,833 confirmed coronavirus infections in the Philippines.

The areas with the most number of the newly-announced cases are the National Capital Region (NCR) with 557 cases, Cavite with 253, Iloilo with 166, Bulacan with 124, and Batangas with 118.

Of Tuesday's additional cases, 83% occurred in the last 2 weeks. Of those, 472 were from Region 4, and 431 were from NCR.

The DOH said the latest tally did not include reports from 20 laboratories that failed to submit data on time.

The Philippines also logged 209 additional recovered patients and 25 new COVID-related deaths, 9 of which were from this month and 15 from September.

With a total of 273,313 recoveries and 5,865 fatalities, there are currently 47,655 active cases in the country.

A total of 22 cases, including 11 tagged as recovered, were removed from the official tally due to being duplicates.

There were also 8 cases “reclassified” after validation showed that they were deaths instead of recoveries.

Except for Oct. 4 and Sept. 28, the Philippines has been logging less than 3,000 cases a day since almost 2 weeks ago.

The DOH said on Monday that the average number of newly-announced cases per day has gone down to 2,400 from around 3,000. Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire attributed this to the improved COVID-19 response of the government.

She cited additional manpower for contact tracing and new strategies for active case finding and surveillance.

Despite this, starting late last week, the Philippines has been in the top 20 countries with the most number of cumulative COVID-19 cases.

Since the start of the pandemic, 35.5 million people have been infected by the COVID-19 virus, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus dashboard. Of those, 1 million people have died and 24.7 million have recovered.