MANILA (UPDATE) — The Philippines reported 1,406 newly-confirmed COVID-19 cases a day after Christmas, bringing the total to 469,005.

Except for Dec. 19, Dec. 22, and Dec. 23, the country has recorded more than 1,500 cases for the past 8 days, as the Department of Health (DOH) warned of a surge in new infections while more Filipinos participated in holiday activities.

Bulacan led areas with new cases after recording 100 new infections, followed by Quezon City with 98, Rizal with 88, Laguna with 73, and Batangas with 69.

The health department recorded 5 new coronavirus-related fatalities. The death toll stood at 9,067. This is the 3rd-straight day that the DOH logged less than 10 deaths, data showed.

Meanwhile, there were 266 new recoveries, pushing the total number of recovered patients to 431,005. Total recoveries account for 91.9 percent of the total recorded cases.

A total of 28,883 or 6.2 percent of the total number of cases are considered active infections. The DOH said 92.5 percent of patients are asymptomatic or exhibiting mild symptoms, while 4.8 percent are critically ill.

Saturday’s figures do not include data from 8-accredited laboratories that failed to submit results to the COVID-19 Data Repository System on Friday.

Of the 10,336 people who were tested on Friday noon, 680 or 6.6 percent tested positive for the disease, according to the DOH.

A total of 2 “duplicates” were removed from the total tally, the DOH said. A recovered case has also been removed.

A patient previously tagged as recovered was also reclassified into a death after the agency’s validation.

Almost 80 million people globally have contracted COVID-19, according to a running tally by the US-based Johns Hopkins University, with the US, India, Brazil, Russia, and France having the highest total cases as of this posting.

Since the pandemic began, over 1.7 million people have died while 45 million have recovered from the disease, the JHU tally showed.

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