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Coronavirus: Philippines receives new testing kits, prioritises pneumonia patients
- The government has received much-needed new testing kits this week from China and South Korea. It previously had just 2,000 left in stock
- They will be used to ensure that ‘severe and critical cases are promptly diagnosed’, one of the country’s leading infectious disease experts says
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A much-needed influx of coronavirus testing kits into the Philippines will be used to test existing pneumonia patients first in a bid to prevent the country’s health care system from “being overwhelmed”, according to an infectious diseases specialist.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that the Philippines only had 2,000 testing kits left for the Covid-19 disease caused by the virus, but the government this week received an additional 2,000 kits from China and 500 from South Korea. Both countries’ governments have promised to donate thousands more, as has Jack Ma, founder of South China Morning Post owner Alibaba Group Holding.
A domestically developed kit has also been produced by the Philippine Genome Centre and the National Institutes of Health and approved for immediate testing by the country’s Food and Drug Administration.
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The additional kits will mostly be used to test vulnerable pneumonia patients, said Dr Edsel Salvana, who leads the technical advisory group of the Philippines’ Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases.
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“At this stage of the epidemic, in order to protect our frontline health care workers, we are assuming that every pneumonia patient is a Covid-19 patient,” he said. “We are already seeing a surge in admissions [for pneumonia] and we need to be ready to handle these cases as they come.”
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