MANILA, Philippines — Some three thousand US-made test kits capable of detecting the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are expected to arrive in the country by next week, the Department of Health (DOH) announced Saturday.

In an online press conference livestreamed on Saturday evening, Health Undersecretary Rosette Vergeire said that the test cartridges would first have to be validated before being sent to testing laboratories.

Validation would take two or three days and will be done to check the kits' compatibility with the country's current testing processes, Vergeire, also DOH spokesperson, said.

“Our 3,000 GeneXpert kits are still arriving next week, but they won’t be granted to our certified laboratories yet because these are still subject to validation,” she said in Filipino.

The GeneXpert kits are not the same rapid test kits that Vergeire earlier said were susceptible to error.

Already approved by the country's Food and Drug Administration earlier in March, GeneXpert is a testing machine often used to detect tuberculosis. The new cartridges give them the capacity to detect for SARS Cov2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Health Secretary Francisco Duque III has called the new Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based testing cartridges a “game changer” for mass testing, an initiative the department was initially slow to roll out at the onset of the outbreak in the Philippines despite mounting calls.

Current testing machines employed by facilities in the country typically take from 24 to 72 hours to yield results after processing.

"Because the GeneXpert machine is automated, the turn-around time—the time it takes to get results once the test finishes processing—is shorter," Vergeire said.

The Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases, which leads the country’s response to COVID-19, has said that its target for testing capacity was 3,000 tests per day, which would eventually be elevated to 8,000 and later 10,000.

The Philippines has over 400 GeneXpert machines nationwide.

The DOH maintains that PCR tests—including the GeneXpert testing cartridges—are the gold standard in detecting the new pathogen as they allow for the detection of genetic material in body fluids or samples.

As it stands, the country is only capable of conducting some 3,000 tests per day with only fifteen testing laboratories accredited by the health department.

If you believe you have come into possible contact with infected patients, you may be directed to the proper office of the Department of Health for advice through the following lines: (632) 8651-7800 local 1149/1150 or (632) 165-364. You may also opt to call the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine at (02) 8807-2631/ 8807-2632/ 8807-2637. The general public has also been encouraged to forward its concerns to the Health Department's dedicated 24/7 COVID-19 hotlines (02) 894-COVID and 1555 (free for all subscribers).