GENERAL SANTOS CITY – The South Cotabato provincial government has appealed to the Department of Health (DOH) to speed up the approval of its proposed 2019 coronavirus disease (Covid-19) testing facility in the wake of the lifting of the community quarantine measures in the area on May 16.
South Cotabato Gov. Reynaldo Tamayo Jr. said Tuesday the operationalization of the testing center in Koronadal City will serve as a safety net in case of the possible surge of Covid-19 cases once the province reopens its borders and remove all movement restrictions.
Tamayo noted that an operational testing center was among the criteria earlier adopted by the provincial inter-agency task force (IATF) on Covid-19 for the normalization of economic activities and other related movements in the province.
The other considerations were the establishment of treatment and isolation facilities as well as the mainstreaming of a reliable contract-tracing system for Covid-19 cases.
The provincial government already opened last month a dedicated Covid-19 hospital or patient care center in Surallah town while its own contact tracing mobile application, dubbed South Cotabato Contact Tracing System, is now ready for the initial rollout.
“We really need to complete these criteria to ensure that we can properly protect and take care of our people here in the province,” Tamayo said in a press conference.
The governor said they have been waiting for more than a month the approval and accreditation of the testing center at the Dr. Arturo P. Pingoy Medical Center in Koronadal City.
He said the testing center has long been ready and they have complied with the necessary requirements but the DOH and the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine have not yet approved its accreditation.
The local government had forged a partnership with the private hospital for the conduct of Covid-19 tests in its biosafety level 2 laboratory.
The Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR "genexpert" machine will be provided by the Integrated Provincial Health Office (IPHO).
Tamayo said he does not oppose the lifting of the quarantine measures after May 15 as long as the requirements to do the same have been met.
As of Tuesday, he said the IPHO reported that less than 500 tests had been conducted in the province so far.
“Ideally, we should have tested at least 10,000 people by now out of our nearly 1 million population,” he said.
Comparing the situation to other areas, he said Cebu City, which has a population of over 1 million, already tested more than 10,000 people, with more than 1,500 turning out positive.
Tamayo said the low number of confirmed cases in the province and the rest of Region 12, which have been declared as low-risk areas for Covid-19, can be attributed to the lack of testing in the area.
He said the IPHO has not taken any swab from suspect patients since last week due to the unavailability of swab kits, noting the same problem is also faced by other provinces based on his consultations with other local officials.
“The reality is, we don’t have new Covid-19 cases because we’re not doing any tests,” he said.
Tamayo said that he will convene the province’s IATF in the next two days to decide on the next measures to take after the end of the general community quarantine on May 15. (PNA)
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