THE Department of Health (DOH) on Tuesday, October 12, 2021, reported more than 25,000 recoveries, less than 9,000 new cases of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) and over 200 additional deaths.

These pushed the number of active Covid-19 cases down to 82,228, the lowest in two months. The Covid-19 death toll, however, increased to nearly 40,000.

Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests for Sars-CoV-2 plunged to less than 35,000, the lowest since April 2021.

The DOH case bulletin Tuesday listed 8,615 new cases, which brought the total case count to 2,683,372.

"The relatively low cases today is due to lower laboratory output last Sunday, October 10," the DOH said in its case bulletin.

Tests conducted on nasopharyngeal swabs and saliva specimens reached only 34,175, about 30 percent lower than the daily average last week. Three laboratories failed to submit their testing data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.

The daily positivity rate decreased further to 15.5 percent, but was still three times the 5.0 percent threshold set by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the safe reopening of the economy.

The additional 236 deaths raised the Covid-19 death toll to 39,896. The case fatality rate swung back to 1.49 percent.

With the new recoveries, the total recoveries increased to 2,561,248, comprising 95.4 percent of the total case count.

Of the 82,228 remaining active cases, 1.6 percent were critical, 3.8 percent were severe, 7.28 percent were moderate, 73.2 percent were mild and 14.2 percent were asymptomatic. (Marites Villamor-Ilano / SunStar Philippines)