Friday 29 Mar 2024
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KUALA LUMPUR (April 24): The Ministry of Health (MoH) has managed to increase its maximum daily testing capacity for COVID-19 to 16,385 tests per day from 11,500 tests per day previously, across 43 laboratories in the country.

This is close to the Ministry's target of 16,500 tests per day, which it had initially said would be achieved by mid-April.

Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said the Ministry is looking to further increase its testing capacity by installing automated testing machines from China in two laboratories in Malaysia.

"When we look into the capacity of the testing now, what we are doing is to try to optimise our testing [approach]. So, we are going to install the automated testing machine from Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) in IMR (Institute for Medical Research) and that will give us an increase of 5,000 tests per day," he told reporters at his daily press conference today.

"And we are also going to install the BGI automated testing machine in Makmal Kesihatan Awam in Kota Kinabalu, and that will give us another extra 1,000 tests [per day] in Sabah," Noor Hisham added.

He previously said that the device would also allow a faster turnaround of results compared to the manual process.

The daily test capacity refers to the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, which is the "gold standard" to diagnose COVID-19, according to Noor Hisham.

However, this does not include the antigen rapid test kits from South Korea that the Ministry had procured last week.

As such, when the test kits arrive – by next week at the latest – the maximum daily testing capacity in the country will increase even further.

When the pandemic first started, the daily testing capacity was 3,500 tests per day.

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