MANILA (UPDATED) — The Philippines recorded 1,772 new coronavirus infections on Tuesday, bringing the total number of cases in the country to 387,161, data from the health department showed.

This is the 21st straight day that the daily tally counted fewer than 3,000, although it does not include data from 18 accredited testing laboratories that failed to submit results on time.

Of the newly-reported cases, 1,621 or 91 percent occurred in the last 2 weeks. The top regions with cases in the recent 14 days were the National Capital Region (NCR) with 389, Region 3 with 262, and Region 4A with 246.

The province of Pampanga led areas in the country that recorded the highest daily additional cases with 154, followed by Quezon City with 115, Laguna with 83, Baguio City with 70, and Manila City with 69.

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Cases of recoveries jumped by 153 over the previous day, the Department of Health (DOH) said in its latest bulletin. The total number of recoveries stood at 348,967, or 90 percent of the total recorded cases.

The country also recorded 49 new fatalities from the respiratory illness, taking the death toll to 7,318.

As of Tuesday, the Philippines has 30,876 active infections, accounting for 8 percent of the cumulative total cases. The DOH said 92.5 percent of patients currently ill are asymptomatic or exhibiting mild symptoms.

The DOH said that of the 14,019 people who were tested last Friday, 1,016, or 7.2%, tested positive for the disease.

A total of 11 duplicates were removed from the total tally, according to the health department. Of these, 3 were tagged as recovered cases.

Meanwhile, 13 cases initially tagged as recoveries were found to be deaths after validation.

Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire on Monday said the COVID-19 cases in the National Capital Region improved from a daily average of about 2,500 cases in August, to only around 500 in the last 2 weeks.

• DOH hopes PH may shift fully to MGCQ by first quarter of 2021

The average number of new cases per day for the whole Philippines also went down to around 1,800.

The health department said it is hopeful that the entire country would be able to shift to more lenient quarantine protocols by the first quarter of 2021, should local government units be able to sufficiently comply with standards on prevention, contact-tracing and treatment.

According to the Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus dashboard, almost 47 million people have been infected by the COVID-19 virus globally since the start of the pandemic. Of those, more than 1.2 million have died, and more than 31.3 million have recovered.