Philippines logs 562 new COVID-19 cases, death toll nears 50,000

MANILA, Dec. 9 (Xinhua) — The Philippines‘ Department of Health (DOH) reported 562 new COVID-19 infections on Thursday, pushing the number of confirmed cases in the Southeast Asian country to 2,835,996.

The DOH also reported that 176 more people died from COVID-19 complications, bringing the country’s death toll to 49,936. Of the 176 reported deaths, only eight occurred this month.

The number of active cases or patients still battling the disease in the country dropped to 12,169.

The Philippines has been reporting below 1,000 cases daily since Nov. 24.

Both COVID-19 infections and hospital admissions are falling in the Philippines, which battled three waves of surges since the detection of the first case in January last year.

Jonas Del Rosario, the spokesperson for the Philippine General Hospital (PGH), said the country’s biggest public hospital had zero admission for COVID-19 patients for the first time in months.

“Now we are seeing a trickle, an average two to four COVID-19 patients a day for the past week. There was a time that we had zero,” he told a television interview.

He said the “small number” of admission is “nothing compared to the 20 average daily COVID-19 patients” the PGH admitted at the height of the latest virus surge. “Our numbers have more or less stabilized,” he added.

Del Rosario said that no health care workers have been sick with COVID-19 for the last two to three weeks. “That’s a good sign,” he added.

East Avenue Medical Center (EAMC) chief medical officer Alfonso Nuñez said only 12 COVID-19 patients are confined at their hospital now.

“For the past seven to 10 days, we only admitted three cases, a far decrease in the number of COVID-19 cases from what we came from last August and September,” he said in the same interview.

He said the hospital decided to convert up to 70 beds in a COVID-19 ward to non-COVID-19 patients. “We have restrategized to maximize the space, beds, and resources,” he added.

The state-owned PGH and EAMC are among the biggest COVID-19 referral hospitals in Metro Manila.

Meanwhile, the DOH said it has not detected the new Omicron coronavirus variant in the 48 samples analyzed on Wednesday.

The samples do not include those taken from the travelers from South Africa, Burkina Faso, and Egypt that entered the country before the government imposed a travel ban on 14 countries from southern Africa and Europe.

The DOH reported its highest caseload on Sept. 11, with 26,303 cases. The Delta variant remains the dominant strain in the country.

The Philippines, which has around 110 million population, has tested more than 23 million people since the pandemic. Enditem

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