IN what appears to be an irony of the description of the job for which he was appointed, Secretary Vince Dizon, the vaccine czar, rejected new calls for an extensive mass testing, citing medical journals.
Dizon, who is also the National Task Force Against COVID-19 deputy chief implementer, argued that the government cannot test the entire Filipino population, even as he cited the need for the government to follow medical journals and statements from health experts to use risk-based and targeted testing strategy than testing the entire 110 million Filipinos.
“Ang mass testing po ay hindi nirerekomenda. Di pwedeng gamiting testing lang para ma-solusyunan ang COVID-19. We cannot test our way out of this pandemic,” said Dizon.
In lieu of mass testing, Dizon instead recommended maintaining minimum health standards, use of face masks, frequent hand washing, and social distancing.
Last week, Senator Risa Hontiveros called on the task force to establish an official mass testing system as part of its COVID-19 response.
She noted that the ramping up of COVID-19 tests to 90,000 per day — as announced by the government — came a little too late.
“We need an official and national mass testing system to hit our targets and to hit them smartly. We need to increase the magnitude of testing and sustain the quality so that we do not post artificial improvement,” Hontiveros said.
Oddly though, Dizon himself made an announcement last week on the government’s plan to ramp up COVID-19 tests to 80,000 to 90,000 per day in Metro Manila and nearby provinces — areas that are experiencing a surge in infections.
To achieve this, he said the government will be using antigen test kits certified by the World Health Organization and the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine along with the RT-PCR test.
In the same Palace briefing, Dizon said the 10,000 average tests in the National Capital Region before the latest surge occurred in the Philippines was already “doubled.”
On Tuesday, the OCTA Research Group projected that the Philippines will have more than 1 million COVID-19 cases before the end of April as the surge continues in the country.
The Philippines on Tuesday registered 9,373 new COVID-19 infections, raising the total tally to 812,760. The new cases brought the number of active cases in the country to 152,562.