(UPDATED) Coronavirus infections in the Philippines breached 2.0 million on Wednesday, September 1, 2021, around 19 months after the first case was confirmed in Metro Manila.
The Department of Health (DOH) on Wednesday, September 1, reported 14,216 new cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), bringing the cumulative case count to 2,003,955.
The cases are usually lower on Tuesdays and Wednesdays because of lower testing output on Sundays and Mondays.
On Monday, August 30, only 51,473 samples were tested, lower than the 65,000 daily average on Tuesdays to Saturdays. Five laboratories were unable to submit their testing data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.
The daily positivity rate remained high at 26.4 percent.
The DOH also reported 86 additional deaths and 18,754 new recoveries in its case bulletin.
The additional deaths, which included 37 cases reclassified from recoveries, raised the death toll to 33,533. The case fatality rate retreated further to 1.67 percent.
With the new recoveries, a total of 1,829,473 people have now recovered from infection.
As there were more recoveries than new cases, the number of active cases declined to 140,949.
Of these active cases, 0.6 percent were critical, 1.2 percent were severe, 1.03 percent were moderate, 96.1 percent were mild and 1.1 percent were asymptomatic.
The first Covid-19 case in the Philippines was confirmed on January 30, 2020. Local transmission was declared on March 7, 2020, after a 62-year-old Filipino male who did have any travel history got infected and subsequently infected his wife.
The cases first peaked in August 2020, when more than 4,000 infections a day were reported nationwide.
Covid-19 cases reached a new record high of more than 10,000 a day in April 2021, coinciding with the detection of more cases with the highly transmissible Alpha (B.1.1.7) and Beta (B.1.351) variants of Sars-CoV-2.
A new record was set on August 30, with the DOH reporting 22,366 cases in one day.
DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire earlier said the cases are projected to rise further and will probably peak in mid-September as the Delta variant (B.1.617.2), which is more infectious than the Alpha and Beta variants, continues to sweep all regions except Bangsamoro.
Vergeire said the Delta variant is now the most common lineage detected in each whole genome sequencing run by the University of the Philippines Philippine Genome Center.
In the August 27 sequencing run, the Delta variant was detected in 69.98 percent of 748 samples.
A total of 1,789 Delta cases have been detected out of 12,667 samples sequenced as of August 27. The UP-PGC has also detected 2,669 Beta cases and 2,395 Alpha cases. (Marites Villamor-Ilano / SunStar Philippines)