Tumaas pa sa 12,000 ang daily testing capacity ng Philippine Red Cross matapos sertipikahan bilang isang coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) center ang kanilang bio-molecular laboratory sa Port Area, Manila.
Ayon kay PRC Chairman Sen. Richard Gordon, nakapasa ang laboratoryo sa proficiency test na isinagawa ng Research Institute for Tropical Medicine noong Biyernes.
“I am glad that our bio-molecular laboratory in Manila has been accredited. Now we can do more tests because the more people we test, the better chances we have of preventing the further spread of the disease,” saad ni Gordon sa isang pahayag.
“The focus must be victory over the virus. That’s why we have to test, test and test — to unmask the invisible enemy,” dagdag nito.
Ang Port Area lab ang ikatlong PRC laboratory ang na-accredit.
May kapasidad na 4,000 tests kada araw ang lahat ng mga laboratoryo na may apat na PCR machines.
Sinabi ni Gordon, malapit na ring makapagsagawa ng 8,000 tests kada araw ang unang dalawa nilang mga laboratoryo.
“We are now close to resolving the difficulties we expected to encounter during the initial phase of our laboratories’ operations,” ani Gordon.
“These past two weeks, we’ve been seeing gradual increases in the number of tests we completed each day and at 11:40 last night, we hit the 5,000 mark.”
Sa mga susunod na linggo din aniya ay posibleng magbukas pa ang Red Cross ng apat na mga testing centers sa Subic, Clark, Batangas, at Los Baños, Laguna.
