The Department of Health (DOH) announced on Wednesday, Sept, 15, that 16,989 more coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases were detected nationwide.

The new cases brought the country’s cumulative total to 2,283,011. The DOH noted that 7.5 percent or 170,446 of the total figure are active cases.

Eighty-five percent of those who are still being treated are experiencing mild symptoms, 9.8 percent are asymptomatic, 0.7 percent are critically ill, 1.4 percent are severely sick, and 2.77 percent have moderate symptoms.

Also, the DOH also recorded 24,123 patients who recuperated from the disease, raising the total recoveries to 2,076,823 which is equivalent to 91 percent of the total case count.

Deaths

The death toll is up by 214 to 35,742, the DOH said.

DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said that this year’s case fatality rate is lower than in 2020.

“We looked at case fatality per region and we saw that nationally, the case fatality rate was lower this year at 1.49 percent versus that from last year at 2.47 percent,” she said.

The case fatality rate remained less than two percent since February of this year, she noted.

“We noted that the highest case fatality rate was in March to April of 2020 at 10 to 19 percent. This decreased to around two percent by August of 2020 and further decreased to less than two percent by February of 2021,” said Vergeire.

“August of 2021 had the lowest monthly case fatality rate at 1.04 percent, but this should be interpreted with caution, since there are delays in reporting of deaths,” she added.

The low case fatality rate can be attributed to “vaccination efforts, upgrades in our health and critical care capacity, referral systems, and clinical management,” the DOH said.