No-Contact Collection Booths Boost COVID-19 Testing in Iloilo

As of May 11, Iloilo City has a total number of 16 confirmed cases of COVID-19 while the province of Iloilo has 18 cases [1]. Although both are now out of enhanced community quarantine and are classified as low-risk areas under a modified general community quarantine, Ilonggos don’t want to let their guard down [2]. With the aim of having safe mass testing for both medical staff and patients, the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) designed Iloilo collection booths designed for no-contact specimen collection. These booths can help medical workers to extract specimens from patients without having direct contact with them.

The medical personnel will be inside the air-conditioned booths, which are designed to maintain a positive pressure that comes from a ventilator with a filter. It also has a small built-in screen that displays the pressure difference and notifies the medical worker of the real-time pressure. Iloilo collection booths are also designed to protect the personnel from outside contamination.

The Department of Health (DOH) Region 6 designated booths to three hospitals:

• Western Visayas Medical Center (WVMC), Mandurriao, Iloilo City

• Western Visayas Sanitarium, Santa Barbara, Iloilo

• Don Jose Monfort Medical Center Extension Hospital, Barotac Nuevo, Iloilo [3]

In line with this strategy, WVMC is intending to increase its daily testing capacity from 500 to 1,000. According to Dr. Stephanie Abello, Chairperson of the Department of Pathology-WVMC, the booths coupled with the use of the automated RNA extraction machine will enable them to boost laboratory tests. Meanwhile, it has been noted that some of the samples are “discrepant” due to the lack of COVID-19 investigation form or other factors like unreadable or missing labels in the samples [4].

Go to Yoorekka for more COVID-19 updates in Iloilo.