The government will test up to 90,000 people

MANILA, Philippines – The national government has finally decided to offer COVID-19 testing to more people for free as the country battles its “most challenging wave yet,” according to an official in charge of the pandemic response.

Vivencio Dizon, deputy implementer of the National COVID-19 Task Force, said the government would actively seek out and isolate people exposed to the virus through the use of antigen kits, a cheaper diagnostic tool that promises a faster response but which is less accurate than the reverse. -transcription polymerase chain reaction test (RT-PCR).

The government through the Office of Civil Defense (OCD) would purchase 500,000 antigen kits for hospitals and densely populated areas in Metro Manila and in the nearby provinces of Laguna, Cavite, Rizal and Bulacan, he said.

Ricardo Jalad, undersecretary of the OCD, said in a text message that the government allocated P235 million for antigen kits, the budget approved for an earlier but failed acquisition last year.

The goal is to conduct 30,000 antigen tests per day during the remaining days of the shutdown in communities where there are confirmed COVID-19 outbreaks and in hospitals for their patients and healthcare workers, Dizon said.

The target of the antigen test, which would begin Wednesday, is those with symptoms or those with very close exposure or contact with positive cases, he said.

“We will negotiate [anew on Tuesday] with legally, financially and technically qualified providers, ”he said.

Test kits must be authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration, the Tropical Medicine Research Institute, and the World Health Organization.

“Make no mistake, this is a very serious wave, the most challenging wave we’ve experienced so far in the fight,” Dizon said in a television interview from a vaccination site in the city of San Juan on Tuesday.

Accelerate crawling

The government plans to increase its tracking effort by testing between 80,000 and 90,000 people, from the daily average of 40,000 to 45,000 during the last two weeks.

“I’m not sure this helps [much] given the complexity of the [present] problem, ”said Dr. Tony Leachon, a former government adviser, who suggested consulting first with medical faculty and experts for mass testing.

In 2020, Leachon said the national government tried to use antigen, which is like a pregnancy kit that gives results in minutes, but was stopped by the Health Department due to its lower accuracy.

Undersecretary of Health María Rosario Vergeire, in an online presentation at the Los Baños Scientific Community Foundation forum on Tuesday, said that the weekly average of RT-PCR tests performed was 50,432.

From a single molecular laboratory, the country now has 236 laboratories authorized to perform RT-PCR, which remains the gold standard in detecting the virus.

But Dizon said the strategy was not only to increase the number of tests performed, but also to get faster results, especially in the critical area of ​​Manila.

The National Vaccination Operations Center has assigned 612,000 vaccines to Metro Manila, 64,000 to Bulacan; 28,800 each to Laguna, Cavite and Rizal; and 7,200 to Batangas, out of a million new doses purchased from Sinovac of China.

But the vaccines would have to remain in a storage facility in the city of Marikina for another five inspection days before they are shipped to hospitals, according to the health department’s supply chain management team.

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