SEN. Joel Villanueva yesterday asked the national government to immediately “release and disperse” the P7.92 billion fund in the 2022 national budget for COVID-19 laboratory networks to augment budgetary demands amid the spike in testing requests due to the surge in cases throughout the country.
Villanueva said the funds should be “downloaded without delay” to public health facilities so they can cope with the high demand in COVID-19 testing.
He said delaying the release of the P7.92-billion fund lodged with the Department of Health “would be a case of underspending that leads to undertesting, which then leads to undercounting of cases.”
He said the funds can also be used to purchase testing kits and laboratory commodities and reagents, training of swabbers, hiring of quality control personnel and be used in recalibration of equipment and facility maintenance, among others.
He said having the funds at their disposal would allow public health facilities to conduct the testing for free since the special provisions governing the use of the said funds calls for the “setting up of swab booths and other operations involving swab specimen collection and antigen rapid diagnostic testing.”
“This can be read as a mandate for free swab testing. The General Appropriations Act explicitly states that we should put up pop-up testing centers,” Villanueva said in a mix of English and Filipino.
He said the free swab testing will largely benefit the minimum wage earners who want to have themselves tested for the virus.
He added that portions of the funds will also be given as assistance to the University of the Philippines National Institutes of Health and the UP- Philippine Genome Center.
Meanwhile, Dr. Rabindra Abeyasinghe, representative to the Philippines of the World Health Organization (WHO), said that instead of engaging in mass testing, it would be more prudent and would be a better use of resources to limit RT-PCR testing to symptomatic patients and those belonging to the vulnerable sector, such as the elders and those with comorbidities.
Abeyasinghe, during the Laging Handa public briefing, said that given the high transmissibility characteristics of the Omicron variant, it is likely that once there is a confirmed case in a household, the rest of the members would also get infected, thus an RT-PCR test may no longer be needed.
“It would be prudent to just isolate or quarantine, as the case maybe, for the required number of days. It could not necessarily test and confirm every infection unless of course you are in the vulnerable groups or elderly where it would be useful to understand so that we can initiate early treatment,” he said.
Abeyasinghe said most people do not need specific treatment like the elders and those with comorbidities.
“Targeted testing is a better use of the resources on RT-PCR test and the hypothesis that if you have a confirmed case in a household and other people are asymptomatic there is no need to confirm testing, you just need to assume that it’s Omicron, because it’s milder. It’s more prudent to just isolate or quarantine as the case may be,” he added.
There have been calls to provide mass testing following the rapid increase in COVID-19 cases in the country, suspected to be due to the mild but more transmissible Omicron variant, as some suspected patients took to home quarantine and self-isolation than seek treatment in hospitals.
Infectious disease experts, however, said mass testing could overwhelm RT-PCR laboratories and eventually delay test results and eventually, treatment. — With Jocelyn Montemayor
