Mandaluyong Government continues to prioritize safety of tricycle drivers and passengers.

The Mandaluyong City Government said it will only allow tricycle drivers to operate if they will test negative for COVID-19 to ensure their safety and the safety of passengers.

Mayor Menchie Abalos said the City Health Department has already conducted rapid testing on 4,500 out of the 7,000 registered tricycle drivers as of last week. Of those tested, there were 277 or around 6% who tested positive and are classified as asymptomatic. But since the World Health Organization (WHO) said that rapid testing has a low accuracy (around 40%) of determining whether a person is positive from COVID-19, a confirmatory SWABBING TEST for RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) test should be done to accurately say if the patient is really COVID-19 positive.

The local government has already swabbed the 277 tricycle drivers. As of May 28, 42 PARTIAL results  OF THE CONFIRMATORY RT-PCR tests were released and all tested negative for COVID-19. THE OTHER 235 CONFIRMATORY TESTS ARE AWAITING RESULTS.

Those who are waiting for the release of their RT-PCR test results will continue to be in isolation and placed under quarantine.

Abalos hopes that the remaining tricycle drivers will test negative to ease the burden of local medical facilities. “We don’t want to be complacent and we will conduct further testing if necessary.”