The country logged another high of 23,074 new recoveries from COVID-19 on Sunday, bringing to 184,687 the number of patients who have recovered from the disease, the Department of Health (DOH) said.
The new data was released as researchers from the University of the Philippines tracking the COVID-19 pandemic said the country has already flattened the curve on new coronavirus infections.
“Actually, cases have already flattened, and we said around two weeks ago that we are seeing a flattening of the curve by the end of August or early September, said Prof. Guido David of the UP Institute of Mathematics.
Guido told CNN Philippines that the country’s reproduction number or the number of people that one COVID-19 patient could infect has declined to 0.94 and continued to go down.
“So they (cases) are decreasing and that is very good news. That only means we have sustained the flattening of the curve,” he added.
The DOH reported 2,839 new cases Sunday, bringing total infections to 237,365. This was the second straight day in which fewer than 3,000 new cases were reported.
Eighty-five new fatalities reported Sunday brought the death toll due to COVID-19 to 3,875.
Minus deaths and recoveries, there are 48,803 active cases undergoing treatment or under quarantine, 88.6 percent of which are mild cases, 8 percent asymptomatic, 1.4 percent severe and 2 percent in critical condition.
Metro Manila still recorded the highest number of new infections at 1,170, followed by Negros Occidental with 195, Laguna with 190, Cavite with 182, and Rizal with 154.
The DOH earlier said it would report time-based recoveries every Sunday under its “Oplan Recovery” initiative, where asymptomatic and mild COVID-19 cases are re-tagged as recovered after completing a 14-day quarantine without developing symptoms.
The Philippines has the highest number of total cases in Southeast Asia despite implementing the longest and strictest lockdown in the region.
An official from the National Task Force against the pandemic said Sunday that the government aims to flatten the COVID-19 curve by end of September, or seven months after the first infection was reported in the Philippines.
Guido had earlier told ABS-CBN that Metro Manila and Calabarzon were starting to flatten the curve on COVID-19 infections, citing a virus reproduction rate of 0.95 in the two regions.
The positivity rate in the virus epicenter also declined to 12 percent from 19 percent, he added.