By Jel Santos The Philippine Red Cross (PRC) is eyeing to build around 20 coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) testing centers in the country. Sen. Richard Gordon, PRC chairman, said several other PRC testing centers are now under construction and are set to open soon. “The PRC is working very hard, around the clock, and with only 1/3 of our people able to come to work, to keep our testing center up and running and to keep setting up new ones. We are going to open about 20 laboratories throughout the entire country,” the PRC chairman said. He said that after the opening of the first testing center, which went into operations early this week, another laboratory, which is capable of doing 4,000 tests a day, is set to be opened within the week. Gordon said another testing center in the PRC’s former national headquarters in Port Area, Manila is set to open soon after the opening of the second laboratory in EDSA. “In Metro Manila, we have the equivalent of six laboratories that can produce, hopefully, at most 12,000 tests a day and 9,000 tests a day. As we speak, we are already operating the testing center right here in the building. Right now, we are doing the backlog from the RITM (Research Institute for Tropical Medicine), because many of them (RITM staff) have fallen sick. I really take my hat off to those people who have been working really hard,” he said. “We’re opening up, maybe on Tuesday, the second laboratory here, which is capable of doing 4,000 tests a day. As I speak, there are about 15 med-techs in the other building being trained to use the machines. And then there’s another one in the old Red Cross headquarters in Port Area, Manila. We will open that in a couple of days after we open the other one here on Tuesday. That will also be an opportunity to send another 4,000 tests a day,” he added. Gordon said four other testing centers are already under construction in Subic, Clark, Batangas, and UP Los Banos, and more testing centers will be opened in the North, the Visayas, and Mindanao. “Then we’ll go to the Visayas and the Northern Mindanao areas. We’ll start with Cebu first and we’ll start with Zamboanga in Mindanao then we’ll go to Cagayan De Oro, Gen. Santos, and Surigao. And then in the Visayas, we’ll have Negros Island, Panay Island, Leyte, and Samar,” he said. “That should really be able to allow us to isolate the cases and make sure that they can be treated and recover faster. We cannot beat this unless we unmask the invisible enemy and we can only do that by testing. And you can separate them, isolate them, and you start treating people. The focus must be victory against the virus."