MANILA, Philippines — The national government has finally decided to offer COVID-19 testing to more people for free as the country battles its “most challenging wave so far,” according to an official in charge of the pandemic response.
Vivencio Dizon, deputy implementer of the National Task Force Against COVID-19, said the government would actively search for and isolate people exposed to the virus by using antigen kits, a cheaper diagnostic tool that promises a quicker turnaround but is less accurate than the reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test.
The government through the Office of the Civil Defense (OCD) would purchase 500,000 antigen kits for hospitals and densely populated areas in Metro Manila and in the nearby provinces of Laguna, Cavite, Rizal and Bulacan, he said.
Ricardo Jalad, the undersecretary for the OCD, said in a text message, the government allotted P235 million for the antigen kits, the approved budget for a previous but failed procurement last year.
The goal is to conduct 30,000 antigen tests daily during the remaining days of the lockdown in communities where there are confirmed COVID-19 outbreaks, and in hospitals for their patients and health workers, Dizon said.
The target of antigen testing, which would begin on Wednesday, are those who are symptomatic or those who have very close exposure or contact with positive cases, he said.
“We will negotiate [anew on Tuesday] with legally, financially, and technically qualified suppliers,” he said.
Test kits must be authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration, Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, and World Health Organization.
“Make no mistake, this is a very serious wave, the most challenging wave we’ve experienced so far in the fight,” Dizon said in a television interview from a vaccination site in San Juan City on Tuesday.
Ramp up tracing
The government plans to ramp up its tracing effort by testing 80,000 to 90,000 people, from the 40,000 to 45,000 daily average over the last two weeks.
“I’m not sure this would help [much] given the complexity of the [present] problem,” said Dr. Tony Leachon, a former government adviser, who suggested consulting the college of physicians and experts first for the mass testing.
In 2020, Leachon said the national government attempted to use antigen, which is like a pregnancy kit that gives out results in minutes, but was stopped by the Department of Health due to its lower accuracy.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire, in an online presentation at Los Baños Science Community Foundation forum on Tuesday, said the weekly average of RT-PCR tests done was 50,432.
From a single molecular laboratory, the country now has 236 licensed laboratories to conduct RT-PCR, which remains the gold standard in detecting the virus.
But Dizon said the strategy was not just to increase the number of tests done, but also to get faster results, especially in the critical greater Manila area.
The National Vaccination Operations Center has allocated 612,000 vaccines to Metro Manila, 64,000 to Bulacan; 28,800 each to Laguna, Cavite and Rizal; and 7,200 to Batangas, out of the 1 million new doses purchased from Sinovac of China.
But the vaccines would have to stay at a storage center in Marikina City for another five days of inspection before these are dispatched to hospitals, according to the health department’s supply chain management team.