Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases came in at 16, 953 from Saturday's 17, 382, the Department of Health (DOH) said Sunday.

The daily case bulletin report came in around 7:30 pm, one hour and half earlier than the DOH's announcement that it would be released at 9 pm.

Cases went down, hospital care utilization declined and positivity rate was lower two days before the National Capital Region (NCR) will be under Alert Level 2.

Total cases were at 3, 545, 680 out of which 202, 864 are active cases. Mild and asymptomatic cases comprised 97.5 of active cases.

Twenty persons died from COVID-19 to raise total fatalities to 53, 891.

There were 27,638 persons who got well after being infected with COVID-19, total recoveries were 3,288,925.

In the NCR, ICU utilization reached 39 percent and ward beds was at 42 percent. Isolation beds were 37 percent full.

The positivity rate reached 31.4 percent from 56, 078 tested on January 28 from 33.3 percent. DMS