The Philippine National Police (PNP) will initiate aggressive mass testing on its personnel in Metro Manila and other areas with high cases of COVID-19 amid the continuous rise in the number of policemen and civilian employees being infected by the virus.
Lt. Gen. Guillermo Lorenzo Eleazar, deputy chief for Administration and concurrent commander of the Administrative Support for COVID-19 Task Force (ASCOTF), said they are now crafting a protocol to schedule the swab test for all police personnel in Metro Manila.
“We have to maximize the conduct of mass testing among our personnel. In this way, we would be able to immediately isolate those who would test positive and give them proper care and eventually stop the transfer of the virus,” said Eleazar.
Eleazar said the aggressive mass testing will also protect the family of police personnel and the community they live in since early detection is important in addressing the pandemic.
Based on the latest PNP data, a total of 8,559 PNP personnel were infected by the coronavirus with 27 deaths. A total of 8,504 were able to recover while there are 478 active cases. The recent data revealed that there were 54 new cases in the PNP, 30 of them are from Metro Manila.
Eleazar said that while the PNP has two molecular laboratories based at the NHQ at Camp Crame in Quezon City that could accommodate 420 tests a day, there were days that the number of PNP personnel being tested did not reach 100.
“We are now coming up with a protocol to test as many of our personnel. Priority areas of these aggressive testing are Metro Manila and other areas with high COVID-19 cases,” said PLt. Gen. Eleazar.
“Part of this protocol is to conduct regular tests on our personnel who are assigned as frontliners and those who are conducting regular law enforcement operations such as personnel of our anti-illegal drugs forces and other units who are on the field running after criminal elements,” he said.
Eleazar said their target is to conduct testing 24/7 for their personnel and to release the results within 24 hours of the test.
“We are also continuously improving our COVID-19 testing database and that is the reason why those who were tested in our laboratories would get the result of the swab test through text messages,” said Eleazar.