Senate to test families of personnel found positive in COVID-19 rapid test

MANILA, Philippines — The families of the Senate employees who earlier tested positive in a COVID-19 rapid test on Monday will also undergo testing, Senator Panfilo Lacson said.

At least 18 employees of the Senate have so far yielded positive results, all of whom have now been transferred to different hospitals for isolation and confirmatory testing under real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) laboratory techniques.

“We are contacting their families so they can also be tested at the senate clinic tomorrow, free of charge. That is the essence of contact tracing which DOH (Department of Health) is miserably failing to do,” Lacson said in a message to reporters.

“That is why, I have always insisted, like a broken record, that massive tests using contact tracing as the baseline data or reference on who to test must be done soon. Otherwise, we will be like, shooting at the moon, or running around like headless chickens,” he added.

Should family members yield a positive result in the rapid test, they will also undergo a PCR-based test for confirmation of COVID-19 infection, according to the senator.

“More important is the immediate isolation as soon as the results are known which only take a few minutes unlike PCR based kits which result takes days, even weeks due to backlogs in running the tests,” Lacson said.

“Given circumstances, mass testing can only be accomplished by using rapid test kits. PCR-based tests are expensive at 3,500, not to mention the backlogs in running the tests which as per information provided by some government hospitals run up to tens of thousands at any given time, while rapid test kits only takes a few minutes to see the results,” he added.

Senator Sherwin Gatchalian earlier confirmed that one of his staff members yielded a positive result in the rapid test.

“I told the staff to be careful with using ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ because the rapid test cannot detect COVID itself. Her test yielded positive with IgG, meaning she has anti-bodies na. She’s not positive with COVID,” Gatchalian said in a message to reporters.

“So the recommendation is for her to undergo a PCR test to confirm,” he added.

The Department of Health (DOH) earlier rejected the use of rapid test kits, saying it would stick to the PCR process for more accurate results.

According to health officials, test kits would only detect antibodies produced by the patient and not the virus itself. The patient could have a “false positive” or a “false negative result.”

A false-negative result may occur when the patient that has contracted the coronavirus has not yet produced antibodies when the test was taken, while a false positive result could emanate when there are antibodies detected but it is not for COVID-19.