MANILA, June 5 (Xinhua) -- The Philippines' Department of Health (DOH) reported 6,955 new COVID-19 infections on Saturday, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the Southeast Asian country to 1,262,273.
The death toll climbed to 21,732 after 195 more patients died from the viral disease, the DOH said.
The Philippines, with a population of more than 110 million, has tested more than 12.7 million people since the outbreak in January 2020.
The average number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the Philippines has increased this week compared to the past two weeks, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said on Saturday.
"We have an average of over 5,200 cases in the previous two weeks, but this week we saw that the seven-day moving average cases increased to 6,691," she said in a televised press conference.
Vergeire said Mindanao island in the southern Philippines has "outpaced" Metro Manila in terms of transmission. The number of new cases in Mindanao accounts for about 25 percent of the country's total cases, she added.
"The burden of cases has shifted to other areas in Mindanao, in some parts of the Visayas region in the central Philippines and also in some parts of northern main Luzon island," she said.
Vergiere attributed the spike in cases to "a multitude of factors," such as the people's mobility, compliance to health protocols, and "deficiencies" in the government's response in detecting, isolating and treating the patients. The emergence of the highly infectious coronavirus variants also contributed to the virus' spread.
"We cannot say that we are in a safe zone because there are areas in the country that are seeing increasing cases," she said, adding that Metro Manila is in a "moderate zone" while some regions in the country are in the "high-risk level". Enditem
