Malacañang announced on Monday that the Philippines is close to upping their capacity for running COVID-19 tests to 20,000 daily.
Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque explained that the addition of the Philippine Red Cross’ testing center would double local capacity for processing swab samples. The Philippines currently has 17 laboratories running 8,000 to 10,000 COVID-19 tests each day.
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“Ngayon dumating na tayo sa punto na bukas po, meron na tayong kakayanan na hanggang 20,000 testing daily. Pero kulang pa rin yan dahil kinakailangan nating ma-test at least 1 percent ng 110 million Filipinos,” Roque said in a press briefing.
[We have come to a point where by tomorrow, we can run as much as 20,000 tests daily. But that’s still not enough because we should test at least 1% of the 110 million Filipinos.]
This means Malacañang aims to have at least 1.1 million residents tested for the disease. According to Roque, they are intending to run 900,000 PCR tests and 2.2 million rapid tests.
Conducting more tests is the current priority of the government as per the recommendation of mass testing given by the World Health Organization as well as the team of medical experts from China.
Roque added that the government is also taking into account the recommendation of adding more COVID-19 quarantine facilities in order to isolate the disease. With this, they have designated 2,780 centers that can cater to as much as 168,000 coronavirus patients.
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