Tourism chief wants price of COVID-19 tests reduced

Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo Puyat on Saturday asked testing centers to lower the price of COVID-19 tests to help revive the tourism industry, saying the high cost of swab tests has dissuaded local tourists from traveling. Puyat said some health facilities were charging as much as P10,000 for the standard reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction test, or double the price cap of P5,000 that the government had imposed. “The added cost of COVID-19 tests can be quite significant especially for big families traveling together,” Puyat said in a statement.

—Marlon Ramos