Baguio City accelerating COVID-19 mass testing

BAGUIO CITY — The summer capital will accelerate mass testing for coronavirus disease  2019 (COVID-19) infections on Monday April 27, using four virus detection machines and test kits, after the lockdown of the city as extended to May 15.

Medical workers can process as many as 200 tests a day using Real Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) confirmatory test kits and four PCR machines now installed at the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center, said Dr. Rowena Galpo, city health services officer.

Baguio City recorded a spike in cases with 8 new infections on Saturday (April 25) that raised the number of COVID-19 patients here to 25.

Mayor Benjamin Magalong, however,  said the increase is expected because of the aggressive tests being conducted.

Frontliners are now being tested regardless of symptoms, which enabled BGHMC to confine two of its doctors, a nurse and an encoder.

The same tests discovered that two of 19 returning workers from overseas, who are quarantined at the Teachers Camp, have been infected.

Only an employee of the Baguio Country Club, and a newborn baby girl, exhibited symptoms, Galpo said.

“The risk-based testing enables the locality to seek out infected residents not only from the pool of people classified as infection ‘suspects,’ who manifest symptoms of the virus but also from the group of COVID-19 probable cases who are asymptomatic or people who do not display flu-like symptoms,” the city’s public information office said.

“This enables early detection and thus leads to the prevention of the transmission of the virus,” it added.

GSG