THE death toll from coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in the Philippines has breached the 42,000 mark, but recoveries continued to increase with over 8,000 more survivors reported Tuesday, October 26, 2021.

The Department of Health’s (DOH) 4 p.m. case bulletin showed that 42,077 individuals have so far succumbed to Covid-19, with 135 new deaths reported Tuesday. This means that the country has a fatality rate of 1.52 percent.

The total recoveries climbed to 2,669,953 or 96.5 percent of all confirmed cases, with 8,470 additional recoveries reported by the DOH.

The number of people who tested positive for coronavirus, however, continued to increase with 4,393 fresh infections as of 4 p.m. Tuesday, October 26. This brought the total caseload to 2,765,672.

This means that the Philippines has a positivity rate of 8.5 percent, said the DOH.

Positivity rate refers to the percentage of all Covid-19 tests that come back positive for coronavirus.

The health department said earlier that it hoped to lower to five percent the country’s positivity rate.

The World Health Organization recommended a positivity rate that is five percent and below to allow countries to reopen their economy.

The DOH said of the 2.7 million confirmed cases in the Philippines, 53,642 are considered active infections. This accounts for 1.9 percent of all cases.

Majority or 74.8 percent of the Covid-19 patients in the country have mild symptoms, 10.37 percent were moderate, 5.8 percent were severe and 2.4 percent were critical.

The health department said all laboratories were operational on October 24 but five were not able to submit data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.

These five laboratories contributed more or less 0.2 percent of the samples tested and 0.3 percent of positive cases based on the data in the last 14 days, the DOH added. (LMY/SunStar Philippines)