The Philippine Department of Health released its latest Covid-19 reports yesterday, June 21, and while the number of new infections is starting to go down, the rest of the numbers are still cause for concern.
The good news: at 5,249 new infections, this rate is the lowest it has been since the beginning of the month, continuing a downward trend over the past days. This puts our total number of cases at over 1.36M, with 55,847 active cases.
There were also 7,053 new recoveries, bringing the total number to over 1.28M, or 94.2% of all cases.
The bad news, however, is that there were 128 new fatalities reported yesterday, the highest it’s been since April 2021. This brings the death toll of the Covid-19 pandemic to 23,749, or 1.74% of total infections.
While this seems like a low number, it continues to put the Philippines among the top 20 countries with the most deaths proportionally to the total number of cases or population, according to data published by the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. This number puts the Philippines ahead of India, which has recorded a 1.3% fatality rate.
This translates to 21.85 deaths per 100,000 people in the Philippines—this time putting the country behind India, with 28.41. However, this figure is higher than that of Indonesia (20.20) and Malaysia (13.8).
Peru is on top of both charts, with a staggering mortality rate of 9.4% of total cases, or 585.05 deaths per 100,000 people.
In the meantime, local authorities have urged caution regarding the more transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus, echoing concerns around the world. So far, there have been a total number of 17 cases of the strain detected in the Philippines, though none have been through community transmission.
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Also read: Everything you need to know about the Covid-19 Delta variant
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