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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 20) – The Health Department reported on Sunday a new batch of 20,021 COVID-19 patients recovered in the country, as the national death toll approached 5,000.
This is the fourth Sunday in a row that DOH announced more than 20,000 new survivors. Each week, the department announces that thousands of new patients have been cleared of the virus based on the criteria of its Oplan Recovery program, which labels mild, asymptomatic patients as recovered after spending a specified time in quarantine and once symptoms have disappeared after a doctor’s evaluation.
Of the new recoveries recorded, the DOH said 19,396 are based on time, while 625 come from routine reports. There are now a total of 229,865 COVID-19 survivors in the country.
The country’s COVID-19 case count also rose to 286,743 with 3,311 new patients registered by health officials.
Metro Manila offset 1,435 of the new infections, while Negros Occidental had 261, Laguna 231, Rizal 204 and Cavite 174, according to DOH.
Meanwhile, the total number of deaths rose to 4,984, with 55 new deaths. Of these, 33 occurred in September, 17 in August, and five in July.
Taking into account recoveries and deaths, the country’s active cases, or currently ill patients, now number 51,894. This is lower than the more than 68,000 registered a day earlier. About 86.6 percent have mild symptoms, 8.7 percent have no symptoms, 1.4 percent are severe cases, and 3.3 percent are in critical condition.
DOH also removed twenty-nine duplicates from the total case count as part of its ongoing data cleansing process. He added that after final validation, 25 cases previously reported as recoveries turned out to be deaths, while three turned out to be active cases.
In a related development, the Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed that four more Filipinos abroad were diagnosed with COVID-19. There are now 10,390 cases among Filipinos living abroad, of which 6,594 have already recovered and 777 have died.
Worldwide, more than 30.7 million people have been infected with the virus, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, based in the United States. More than 957,000 of this number have lost their lives to COVID-19, while around 21 million have recovered.
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