The Department of Health (DOH) recorded 421 new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infections nationwide on Tuesday, Dec. 28.
The country's running tally of confirmed cases is now at 2,839,111, of which 0.3 percent or 9,750 remain active.
Of the active cases, 489 of them show no symptoms, 3,766 have mild symptoms, 3,343 are moderate, 1,178 are severe, and 374 are critical.
Also, two more patients succumbed to the viral illness causing the death count to increase to 51,213 or 1.80 percent of the total case tally.
However, another 248 more patients were able to recover. This figure brought the total number of recoveries to 2,778,148.
New format: ‘Advisories’ instead of case bulletins in 2022
DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire clarified that all data concerning COVID-19 will still be available on their official website and they will provide information in the format of an “advisory” instead of a case bulletin.
“I think there was this confusion yesterday. We are not going to stop to provide information to the public. We are just going to stop issuing out the case bulletin,” explained Vergeire in a television interview.
“But what we are going to do also would be to issue out advisories every day---where the daily reported cases will be included and there will be condensed analysis,” she added.
“We are not going to stop providing data or information. We are just trying to reformat and strategize so that our citizens can find our information more useful through our social media platforms,” she furthered.
Vergeire explained that they “found that most of the details within this case bulletin are not so much useful to our citizens anymore.”
“What they really would like to look at everyday is the number of cases, maybe the number of deaths but the main messages towards the bottom of this case bulletin is not really being appreciated. So what we did, we try to re-strategize and discuss with our team and now what we are going to do, we will stop issuing out this case bulletin,” she said.
“We are just reformatting this so that we can better provide information in an analyzed manner and better guide our public,” she added.
Aside from issuing out advisories starting next year, Vergeire reiterated that all COVID-19 data is being presented in their website.
“We are referring people to our DOH COVID-19 tracker within our DOH website where completed information there. All the details in the case bulletin there,” she said.