MANILA — The Department of Health (DOH) on Tuesday reported 886 additional COVID-19 cases or a total of 471,526 confirmed coronavirus infections in the Philippines.

Nine testing laboratories failed to submit their results on time.

For the past days, the DOH has been reporting less than 1,000 new cases a day, attributing it to the low number of people being tested due to the holidays. It did not say how many laboratories were closed, which contributed to the lower than usual tally for Tuesday.

The DOH also recorded 38 new COVID-related deaths or a total of 9,162 fatalities.

There were also 253 additional recovered patients or a total of 439,016 recoveries.

Of the 23,348 active cases, 80% have mild symptoms, 10.6% are asymptomatic, 5.9% are in critical condition, 3.1% have severe symptoms, and 0.44% have moderate symptoms.

Because of duplicate entries, the DOH removed 10 cases, 9 tagged as recovered, from its official tally. There were also 8 cases tagged as recovered that were actually fatalities.

Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire reminded Filipinos to follow minimum health standards to prevent the expected increase in cases in January due to holiday gatherings.

She said keeping the number of cases low will also lower the possibility of the virus evolving into new variants.

The OCTA Research Group previously estimated around 480,000 total COVID-19 cases in the Philippines by the end of the year.

Since the start of the pandemic, 81.3 million people have been infected by the COVID-19 virus, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus dashboard. Of those, more than 1.7 million have died and 46 million have recovered. This means around 33.5 million are still currently infected with COVID-19.

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