Davao Oriental: The province of Davao Oriental has already begun rolling out risk-based testing for coronavirus among its target population.
Since last week, a total of 169 individuals have already been tested under the province’s ongoing risk-testing – 48 of which are frontline health workers while 127 are Persons Under Monitoring who include stranded individuals from Davao City rescued by the province’s Oplan Sundo. Of these 48 frontline workers, 37 have tested negative while the rest are still awaiting results as of Saturday. Meanwhile, out of the 127 PUMs, 4 have tested negative while results for the remaining 123 have yet to arrive.
On the other hand, testing for COVID suspects were done even before the roll-out of the risk-based testing. Out of the 61 suspects, 44 have tested negative while the rest are still awaiting results.
Provincial Task Force on COVID-19 Action Officer Dr. Reden Bersaldo emphasized the urgency of conducting the risk-based testing as it is the only way that the province can say for sure that it is definitely free from the coronavirus. “Until then, we cannot afford to let our guards down,” he said.
Around 11,000 sets of RT-PCR test kits and 16,000 sets of personal protective equipment (PPEs) for health personnel have been purchased by the province purposely for the risk-based testing. Most of these were already distributed to the Local Government Units in the municipalities and city who have also started to procure their own test kits and PPEs.
Dr. Bersaldo underscored that the province is making use of the RT-PCR or reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction test kits as it is considered as the “gold standard” for testing coronavirus and is more accurate than the rapid test kits.
Moreover, healthcare personnel, mostly nurses and medical technologists of the city and municipal health offices were trained to perform the swab testing to augment a handful of available trained personnel in the province.
“With this, the province would just provide the test kits and PPEs to the LGUs for them to do the swab testing themselves,” said Dr. Bersaldo, noting that the ongoing risk testing is a collaborative effort between the provincial government and the local government units in the city and municipalities.By Karen Lou Deloso