MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine Red Cross (PRC) will open more testing centers for the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Metro Manila and other parts of the country as its mobile testing site in Quezon City is expected to start operating this week.
The move is expected to beef up the country’s testing capability and help manage the government’s response to the virus which had prompted the President to place Luzon under a monthlong enhanced community quarantine.
Sen. Richard Gordon, PRC chair, said on Monday that the agency’s current and old headquarters in Mandaluyong and Manila, respectively, would be turned into testing centers.
Speaking at the Laging Handa briefing, he added that he was also in talks with Ateneo de Manila University for the possible installation of a container van that would be turned into a testing laboratory.
The PRC was also in discussions with the University of the Philippines Los Baños for the deployment of automatic extraction machines to boost its capability. The state university already has its own machines, Gordon said.
Other possible sites for testing centers were Batangas province, Clark in Pampanga, Cagayan de Oro, Zamboanga, Davao del Sur and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
Preparations were already underway for a testing center in Cebu province that could be completed in two weeks, he said.
Gordon said the PRC would no longer put up a testing facility in an area that had a Department of Health (DOH) testing center, adding, “We don’t want the centers to overlap.”
Many experts and officials have been pushing for mass testing, which does not mean testing every single person but a wider scope of patients.
At the same time, Gordon called on the DOH to identify and designate dialysis centers in various areas that would serve only COVID-19 patients.
He said that if the positive patients had to go to the National Kidney and Transplant Institute for dialysis, the staff who took care of them would have to undergo quarantine.