T3 team, private sector thanked for increased Covid-19 testings

CLARK FREEPORT-National Action Plan Against COVID-19 Chief Implementer Secretary Carlito Galvez thanked the Task Force Test, Trace, Treat (T3) and its private sector partners in coming together to ramp up the country’s overall testing capacity.

The Task Force T3 and private sector partners have increased the country's capacity to 74,000 tests per day, with 75 labs and a turnaround time of just 72 hours or less for results. This increased from a capacity of 3,000 tests per day in April and only 17 labs with a turnaround time of 2 weeks, before the T3 coalition was formed.

T3 is a partnership between the InterAgency

Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases, the Department of Health, the Asian Development Bank, the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation and several dozen private organizations. Its goal is to help ramp up the government’s testing, tracing and treatment efforts to beat COVID19.

Deputy Chief Implementer Secretary Vince Dizon added that the goal is to now do 10 million tests within the next 10-12 months, with plans to aggressively expand testing protocols to non-medical personnel, particularly to essential workers frequently in contact with large volumes of people such as security guards, cashiers, market and street vendors, and transport sector workers, as well as in economic zones and priority tourist destinations.

“It has been a challenging fight thus far, and we will continue to face these challenges head on through various efforts of the national and local governments and with the private sector as an invaluable partner in this fight. It is only by working together that we can again start to rebuild our lives and the economy,” Dizon sai d .

During a meeting with the private sector, Galvez and Dizon also stressed that as the country opens up more, every Filipino must take more responsibility and be very disciplined in following basic health measures and precautions to ensure their own safety as well as the safety of the public. They also called on both local governments and private companies to strictly enforce the wearing of masks, frequent hand washing, and physical di st anci ng.

They also urged the private sector to do their part in testing their workforce and conducting aggressive contact tracing in the workplace using StaySafe.ph. They cited the effort undertaken by the San Miguel Corporation to open their own COVID-19 laboratory to test all of their 70,000 employees.