Valenzuela govt to ink agreement with new virus lab to test more patients

MANILA, Philippines — The Valenzuela City government will sign a memorandum of agreement (MOA) with a new private laboratory to test more patients for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), Valenzuela City Mayor Rex Gatchalian said Wednesday.

“We will sign MOA with another new (Food and Drug Administration) approved private lab partner that will add to our daily targeted mass testing capacity,” Gatchalian said in a tweet.

10am Today we will sign moa with another new FDA approved private lab partner that will add to our daily targeted mass testing capacity….

This new partner will process 90 of our kits daily…so with The Medical City's 25 kits daily, this new partnership will bring to

— Rex (@rex_gatchalian) April 14, 2020

Gatchalian noted that the new partnership will allow them to test all suspects and frontliners by Sunday (April 19).  A suspect is a new classification for persons under investigation who have not been tested for the coronavirus disease.

“Meaning by this Sunday all PUM (persons under monitoring), PUI (persons under investigation) (suspect and probable) of the city would have been tested already. So come Sunday we can now test all front line heroes, and new call-in cases,” he said.

Gatchalian said the new laboratory, Detoxicare Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory, Inc., will process 90 test kits per day while The Medical City, Valenzuela City’s other laboratory partner, will produce 25 test kits daily.

“This new partner will process 90 of our kits daily so, with The Medical City’s 25 kits daily, this new partnership will bring to115 kits processed daily,” the mayor said.

In a virtual press conference on Wednesday, Gatchalian revealed that the new laboratory and The Medical City will help them conduct 700 tests per week.

He also announced that they expect to finish backlogs in their city by Saturday (April 18).

“By this weekend, by this  Saturday, we will no longer have any backlogs, pagdating sa (when it comes to) PUMs, we still tested PUMs and former PUIs. What they now call probable and suspects,” Gatchalian said.

After conducting their mass testing last April 12, the mayor said they received the first batch of test results with 18 negative results while two were positive results.

He explained that the two confirmed cases were previously tested positive by the Research Institute of Tropical Medicine. They were still found positive after going through Valenzuela City’s mass testing.

As of April 14, Tuesday, the Valenzuela City health department documented 46 confirmed COVID-19 cases including four deaths and three recovered patients.

Valenzuela City also has 195 suspects.

/MUF