(CNN Philippines) Metro Manila — The country reported 16,907 new COVID-19 infections on Saturday, bringing the nationwide tally to 2,470,175, the Department of Health (DOH) said.

The department’s latest case bulletin also showed that out of the total number of cases, 6.7% or 165,092 are active or currently sick. At least 81.3% of the active cases have mild symptoms, 13.3% are asymptomatic, 3.12% are in moderate condition, 1.6% have severe symptoms, and 0.7% are in critical condition.

The number of recoveries also rose to 2,267,678 – which is 91.8% of the COVID-19 count – with 27,120 new survivors.

Meanwhile, the death toll remained unchanged for the second straight day at 37,405 due to technical issues in the data repository COVIDKaya system. This would also mean fatality counts in succeeding reports will be higher due to backlogs, the DOH noted.

The agency also said it deleted 60 duplicate cases from the total, including 41 recoveries.

The tally excludes data from four laboratories that failed to submit their reports on time. These laboratories contributed an average of 0.7% of tested samples and 0.8% of positive individuals in the last 14 days, the DOH added.

The positivity rate or percentage of tested people with positive results further dropped from 24.2% based on tests on Sept. 22 to 23.6% based on 74,606 tests reported on Sept. 23.

The rate is the lowest following August 16 (23.2%) but is still within the critical level of above 20%. The percentage should be below 3% to indicate adequate testing, according to US nonprofit Covid Act Now. For the World Health Organization, a positivity rate of below 5% means the area already controlled the infection.

OCTA Research fellow Guido David said the latest case tally pulled the country’s COVID-19 reproduction number down to 0.98 and its one-week growth rate to -13%. Reproduction number refers to the number of people infected by a single case, and ideally should be one or less, as anything higher means there is still significant community transmission, medical experts have said.