20,000 Test Kits Remaining

According to Doctor Manzanero, the Central Medical Laboratory did not run any batch of samples on Sunday as they are preparing samples for processing today as well due to routine quality control measures. Manzanero says that twenty thousand testing kits are remaining and given the testing rate at the moment, the kits will last about two months.

Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services

“We have always known the ability of the lab is to put out samples. If you have three machines running and each takes about ninety per cycle. You can be putting at max two hundred and seventy, three hundred samples on a given day which is what has been happening some days of last week.  What makes the processing a bit difficult is what you called a manual extraction of each samples. I know that there has been an attempt to help in that process. Also understand that we are not going to be do blanket testing and that has never been part of our plan. I think it has been clearly articulated in March and April that once you have documented transmission in a community you don’t do blanket testing for everybody. That has always been in the plan. We said that in March. We said that every month.  We keep saying it five months later because that is not the way it is done. Once you have community transmission you will go for the people who have a poorer outcome and the ones who are heavily symptomatic and that is what we are doing.”

Marvin Manzanero

Hipolito Novelo

“How many test kits do we have remaining or how many do we have so far?”

Dr. Marvin Manzanero

“Probably like twenty thousand. If you are doing three hundred test per day, you do the basic math. We are going to do three thousand tests every ten days. If you do it at that rate, it is going to last you two months.”