DOH to recommend COVID-19 testing for incoming travelers on 7th, 8th day

The Department of Health (DOH) will recommend that incoming travelers be tested for COVID-19 seven or eight days after their arrival in the country in a bid to tighten border control, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said Wednesday.

Under current guidelines, travelers are subjected to COVID-19 testing on the fifth day from arrival unless they show symptoms at an earlier date. 

Vergeire said new evidence showed that the viral load remains high until the seventh or eighth day.

“That’s why we are revising again our protocol and we will be presenting to IATF to adopt this kind of implementation,” she said in an interview on ANC, referring to the government’s inter-agency COVID-19 task force.

“We want to be sure that we get to identify all of these travelers coming in accurately so that we can isolate properly and we can break the chain of transmission, but this is still for approval in the IATF,” she added.

The recommendation to revise protocols came after the DOH observed that some local governments do not strictly enforce the completion of the mandatory 14-day quarantine once travelers are endorsed to them after COVID-19 testing.

“We have seen that there are lapses in this kind of protocol that’s why we are revising so that we can have stricter border control especially now that there are different variants,” Vergeire said.

The Philippines has so far recorded 1,075 cases of the B.1.351 (South Africa) variant, 948 cases of the B.1.1.7 (United Kingdom), 157 cases of the P.3 (Philippines), and two cases of the P.1 (Brazil) variant. 

The government imposed a temporary ban on travelers from India to block the entry of a new coronavirus variant detected there that is believed to be contributing to its surge in COVID-19 cases. —KBK, GMA News