CASES of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) on Wednesday, August 11, 2021, jumped past 12,000 in one day, the highest in four months, as these continued to climb toward a third epidemic peak.
Department of Health (DOH) Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said the cases are seen to continue increasing and the positivity rate is expected to remain elevated because a lot of local government units (LGU) have become more proactive in case finding.
In its case bulletin Wednesday, the DOH recorded 12,021 new Covid-19 cases, the highest since the 12,674 on April 10.
The DOH also reported 154 additional deaths and 9,591 new recoveries.
The new infections brought the cumulative case count to 1,688,040. There were 137 duplicates, including 129 recoveries, that were removed from the tally.
Of the total, 81,399 were active cases, including three cases reclassified from recoveries. These were the highest in more than three months, since the 89,485 recorded on April 24.
Testing was relatively low, reaching only 38,478 on August 9 as three laboratories were unable to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.
The daily positivity rate was still high at 21.9 percent, which means that a more than one in every five persons test positive for Sars-CoV-2.
The additional mortalities, which included 112 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries, raised the death toll to 29,374. The case fatality rate remained at 1.74 percent.
Total recoveries increased to 1,577,267, comprising 93.4 percent of the cumulative case count.
Vergeire advised LGUs to continue undertaking active case finding by going to houses to test people who have symptoms, or who have been exposed to a confirmed or probable Covid-19 case.
“This is the only way for us to immediately cut transmission in the community, by identifying those who are sick so that we can immediately isolate them at once,” she said.
The highly contagious Delta variant of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is believed to be driving this latest surge in infections.
A total of 450 cases with the Delta variant have been detected in 13 out of the 17 regions in the country.
The regions with Delta cases are National Capital Region (146); Calabarzon (47); Central Visayas (37); Central Luzon (39); Northern Mindanao (22): Ilocos (5), Cagayan Valley (1), Bicol (1), Western Visayas (36), Eastern Visayas (11), Zamboanga Peninsula (3), Davao (6) and Cordillera (1).
Those without Delta cases are Mimaropa, Soccsksargen, Caraga and Bangsamoro.
All 17 regions also have cases with either the Alpha or Beta variants, which are less transmissible than the Delta variant but more contagious than the original strain that emerged in Wuhan, China.
Covid-19 cases in the Philippines first peaked at 6,958 on August 10, 2020.
The second peak occurred in the week from April 9 to 15, 2021, when cases averaged more than 10,800 a day and the highest daily count was 12,674.
The DOH case bulletins show that the highest daily count in April was 15,310 on April 2, but this number included a backlog of 3,709 cases from March 31 which were not counted due to technical issues in the epidemiological surveillance system. (Marites Villamor-Ilano / SunStar Philippines)