KUALA LUMPUR, April 24 — Malaysia will be able to conduct 6,000 more Covid-19 tests on top of its 13,000 daily average through the use of specialised devices imported from China, Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said today.

Dr Noor Hisham said automated testing equipment from the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) will be installed in two locations in the country: the Institute of Medical Research (IMR) and a public health clinic in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.

"When we look into our capacity of testing, we are trying to optimise our testing. We have two centres in IMR that will give us an increase of 5,000 tests per day and a public health clinic in Kota Kinabalu that will give us another extra 1,000 tests in Sabah.

"So we are increasing our capacity of testing and we are addressing it in terms of RT-PCR. This is the gold standard of us diagnosing Covid-19,” he said in his daily Covid-19 press briefing here.

RT-PCR or reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction is a nuclear-derived method for detecting the presence of specific genetic material from any pathogen, including a virus.

He said Malaysia’s testing capacity initially hovered around 11,500 in the beginning of the outbreak and has steadily increased over time to about 13,600 in 43 laboratories nationwide.

Earlier today, Dr Noor Hisham announced 88 new Covid-19 cases and one more fatality in the country.