Heads up, Quezon City residents: You’ll soon have your own molecular laboratory for processing COVID-19 tests.
This was announced by the Quezon City local government unit (LGU), which plans to open the facility by the last week of August upon receiving the approval of the Department of Health (DOH). According to the LGU, the lab will be put up in Barangay Teachers Village East and can process 500 COVID-19 tests daily with only one to two days to produce results.
Currently, the laboratory is in the third out of five levels of accreditation by DOH. Its equipment and facilities were procured by the LGU through donations of the private sector.
Quezon City mayor Joy Belmonte also noted that the laboratory can process other medical tests such as tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus and dengue, which makes it an “investment” in the long run. Aside from the testing laboratory, it will also have a data encoding area and sleeping quarters for employees.
The facility will be run by 20 City Health Department members, who will be trained at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM).
The city’s COVID-19 task force head Joseph Juico said that through this new laboratory, the LGU will be able to cut down expenses from paying private hospitals and laboratories to process tests. “The city government is dedicated to make QC independent in processing its own tests,” said Juico.
As of Aug. 10, there are 105 accredited COVID-19 testing laboratories nationwide. Two of these are in Quezon City, which are real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) and cartridge-based polymerase chain reaction (cartridge-based PCR) laboratories in the Lung Center of the Philippines.
Header photo by CDC on Unsplash
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Writer: YANN MAGCAMIT
