THE seven-day average of new cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) declined to below 7,000 on Saturday, May 8, 2021, but daily deaths continued to exceed 100 for the fourth day in a row.
The Department of Health (DOH) case bulletin on Saturday showed 6,979 new infections, which brought the seven-day moving average down to 6,902 from around 8,200 in the period April 26 to May 2 and more than 10,000 in the first half of April.
The daily positivity rate also remained below 15 percent for the fifth day. Out of 50,122 samples tested on May 6, 14.3 percent yielded positive results.
There were, however, 170 additional mortalities, which raised the death toll from Covid-19 to 18,269. The case fatality rate increased again to 1.67 percent.
The DOH also reported 10,179 additional recoveries based on its time-based tagging methodology which declares as recovered those mild and asymptomatic cases without symptoms for at least 10 consecutive days.
These brought the total recoveries to 1,013,204, constituting 92.5 percent of the country’s cumulative cases.
As recoveries were higher than the new cases, the number of active cases decreased to 63,376, or 5.8 percent of the total cases.
The Philippines’ total caseload increased to 1,094,849 on Saturday and was expected to hit 1.1 million on Sunday, May 9.