Conglomerate San Miguel Corp. is donating five sets of high-capacity testing machines and 20,000 test kits to the Department of Health to boost the government’s testing capacity by 11,000 per day.
San Miguel said in a statement it would distribute the RT-PCR machines and high-throughput automated RNA extraction systems to critical government centers in the country.
The donation will help increase the government’s capacity and efficiency to mass test for COVID-19, as the nation starts drawing up plans to transition safely out of quarantine by middle of May. It will also allow beneficiary laboratories to test faster, using less time and human intervention.
The World Health Organization earlier laid down conditions for governments wanting to ease restrictions and reopen their economies to include capacity to mass test and control transmission.
The testing machines which arrived Monday via a chartered flight will be distributed by the DOH to the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine.