THE country’s 10 provinces will soon have Covid-19 testing, referral and isolation centres, as members of the Cabinet taskforce were yesterday deployed to various stations countrywide to assess progress on readiness to combat the novel coronavirus.

This comes as the Global Fund last week released US$5 million to Zimbabwe out of the US$25 million that it has pledged to the country for the anti-Covid-19 fight.

To ease pressure on the country’s sole testing unit, the National Microbiology Reference Laboratory in Harare, 167 testing machines are expected to be installed countrywide from rural clinics to provincial hospitals, in a development that will increase the number of people tested for the virus.

Starting this week, Mpilo Provincial Hospital is set to become the second Covid-19 testing centre after a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) unit was set up at the institution.

A detailed report on Covid-19 readiness is expected tomorrow after Cabinet ministers were tasked to work with provincial health officials to identify and refurbish the centres.

Health and Child Care Minister Dr Obadiah Moyo said under Government’s grand plan, all the country’s provinces would become autonomous in attending to Covid-19 cases.

“The vast majority of the testing will be conducted through the use of GeneXpert PCR machines.

Countrywide, we have 167 GeneXpert PCR machines but at the moment they cannot be used because they do not have the required Covid-19 cartridges.

“These cartridges are on order and are expected to arrive in the country within a week, or at the most two weeks.

“So if we can get all these 167 machines up and running we will be able to carry out testing in all the provinces down to the rural clinic level,” he said.-State media