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Manila Bulletin devider Philippines devider Luzon devider Davao reg'l hospital running out of COVID-19 test cartridges

Davao reg'l hospital running out of COVID-19 test cartridges

Published Jul 26, 2020 04:21 pm

DAVAO CITY — The Davao Regional Medical Center (DRMC) is running out of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cartridges for its two units of GeneXpert, which process specimens from three provinces of Davao Region and the entire Caraga Region, according to its chief of hospital Dr. Bryan O. Dalid.

The government hospital in Tagum City has been catering to the provinces of Davao del Norte, Davao de Oro, Davao Oriental, and the entire Caraga Region since May 30 after receiving accreditation as a sub-national laboratory from the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) and Department of Health (DOH)-Health Facilities and Services Regulatory Bureau (HFSRB). 

Dalid said the hospital has already asked the national government to send 1,400 additional cartridges to continue with its GeneXpert operation.

He said the DRMC received just a total of 2,300 cartridges to run the two units of US-made GeneXpert machines.

He said the laboratory has less than a hundred remaining cartridges, and has been redirecting specimens coming from Caraga Region to Southern Philippines Medical Center (SPMC) since last week.

“As we all know, Caraga region has no COVID testing center as of the moment, in a private setting whether it’s GeneXpert or RT-PCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction. That is why, Caraga is sending specimens to us for testing. However, three days ago we were redirecting their specimens already to SPMC because we’re running low on cartridges and I hope we can have more cartridges so that we can resume testing our catchment areas,” he added.

He said the DRMC has so far processed 2,161 samples as of Friday. Of this total, 136 yielded positive results while 2,025 turned out negative.

Dalid said the two GeneXpert machines process about 65 tests per day, from Mondays to Fridays, but “for the past four days, we are at five to 10 because we are running low on cartridges.”

He said the Philippines could only get a limited supply of cartridges from Cepheid, the US-based manufacturer.

“We have a little bit of problem now in terms of cartridges.  Our GeneXpert machines were reconfigured machines, which are originally intended for testing of MDR-TB (multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). The manufacturer, Cepheid, reconfigured these and made cartridges that can detect SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19,” he said.

He said cartridges, manufactured by Cepheid, would be apportioned among more than 20 countries, including the Philippines, that utilize GeneXpert for COVID-19 testing.

He added they were hoping to get the RT-PCR laboratory of DRMC operationalized by the third week of August, which can process 100 specimens daily through manual extraction and up to 300 tests daily through automated extraction.

As of July 25, Department of Health-Davao reported a total of 1,133 cases in the region with 45 deaths and 622 recoveries.

Of the total cases, 762 were in Davao City, 121 in Davao del Norte, 50 in Davao del Sur, 79 in Davao de Oro, 95 in Davao Oriental, and 26 in Davao Occidental.

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