The Department of Health said that they will recommend the testing of incoming travelers to the country, seven or eight days after their arrival.
DOH spokesperson Ma. Rosario Vergeire made the announcement amending the current guidelines where travelers are tested on the fifth day unless they are symptomatic.
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Vergeire explained that new evidence showed that the viral load remains high until the seventh or eighth day.
“That’s why we are revising our protocol and we will be presenting to IATF to adopt this kind of implementation,” she said in an interview on ANC.
“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.
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Vergeire said that the recommendation testing protocols following the recent lapses on the implementation of quarantine protocols.
“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. (TDT)
