Gov’t speeds up COVID-19 tracing, testing in regions

The national task force overseeing the government’s response to the new coronavirus pandemic has started testing people for the disease by ferrying them on buses to centralized testing centers and isolating asymptomatic patients from their communities to government quarantines.

In the provinces, such as Batangas, the distance between towns or from a household to the testing site and the lack of transportation has led to a low turnout of people availing of the real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, even as the government has made the costly diagnostics free under the Bayanihan 2 Act, said provincial health director Rozvilinda Ozaeta.

Michael Salalima, chief of staff of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) and in charge of the national government’s Oplan Kalinga, said government buses would be deployed and pick up people at designated points for testing. Some of them had to travel from “50 kilometers away,” he said.

Oplan Kalinga, which aims to move asymptomatic patients out of their homes to facilities, works in tandem with the Aggressive Community Testing (ACT), as seen in Solano town in Nueva Vizcaya province, whose infection was reduced from an average of 500 to 29.

The government’s more “aggressive” measures received P4.5 billion in funding under Bayanihan 2.

Focus area

Salalima said the same project would be rolled out in Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon), a “focus area” on the outskirts of Metro Manila, the virus epicenter, starting with a four-day ACT in Batangas which ended on Tuesday.

The government designated as testing sites the Batangas provincial capitol, Don Manuel Lopez District Hospital in Balayan town, and a district hospital in Laurel town to get swab specimens of 6,000 people.

But as of the latest count on Monday, Salalima said only about 2,200 had been tested, among them close contacts of a positive case, front-line workers and people from workplaces with high human traffic.

“We’re doing good at the [capitol site testing], but not much in the other two. Most people said the problem was they didn’t own a vehicle [to go to testing sites], that’s why the government provided buses,” Ozaeta said.In every batch, 8 to 10 percent turned out positive, Salalima said.

Specimen collected through ACT were processed by Red Cross laboratories.

Batangas prepared 900 beds for isolation, such as in hotels or resorts turned quarantine centers. As of Oct. 5, 7,309 cases had been recorded in the province, the second lowest in the region though it had stayed under stricter quarantine rules similar to Metro Manila.

‘Superspreader’

“[People] should understand that Bayanihan 2 is not just for [Metro Manila] but for provinces as well,” Salalima said.He said among the reasons the national task force on COVID-19 focused on Batangas was the recent case of a “superspreader,” a detainee, who infected 147 people.

Recent case surges in Batangas were also reported inside economic zones, like in a company worksite in Bauan town where 10 percent of its workforce acquired the disease.

The task force has been pushing local governments to increase their testing capacity to a ratio of 1:10 or testing 10 people who came in close contact with every positive case. The “formula” proposed by Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong, who has been tapped by the government as its “contact tracing czar,” was 1:37. “Realistically, we could do at least 1:10,” Salalima said.