Testing czar Vince Dizon said Tuesday that in the wake of the exponential surge in cases, the government will double the daily rate of COVID-19 testing in the country.
Experts and the COVID-19 task force recommended 90,000 daily tests from the current 45,000 in the weeks to come, according to Dizon.
“We’ve been hitting above 45,000 tests on average, and we even hit a high of 58,000 tests per day,” Dizon said. “But despite that tremendous number of tests per day, we still need to test more.”
He said the government plans to use the World Health Organization and the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine—certified antigen tests, which provide faster results than the RT-PCR (real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction), considered the gold standard.
The need to swiftly detect COVID-19 infections for immediate isolation was also noted by Dizon.
“Right now, time is of the essence,” he said. “It’s not just about the number of tests that we do. It’s also about the time by which the tests come out.”
