More mobile testing for coronavirus coming to Broward County, governor says
A mobile testing site for COVID-19 will open Friday at CB Smith Park in Pembroke Pines — across the street from Memorial Hospital West — after the state delivered 4,000 testing kits with swabs for a new drive-thru site in partnership with Memorial Healthcare System.
Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the new drive-thru site, which will prioritize two groups of people for testing. Healthcare workers and first responders will be prioritized as will people 65 and older with symptoms of the disease, including cough, fever and difficulty breathing plus a history of travel on a cruise to an affected area. No doctors referral or prescription is required for those who meet the other criteria. The site will be open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.
“We have test kits here for the hospital,” DeSantis said, while flanked by members of the National Guard and doctors and epidemiologists from Memorial Healthcare, the public hospital system for South Broward.
He said first responders will be prioritized for testing because, “If they test positive, then that could potentially sideline a lot of the people that they’re working with.”
As the state buys more test kits and supplies and receives more help from the federal government, he said, the criteria for those eligible to be tested at the drive-thru site will expand. DeSantis said he wants more people tested for COVID-19, including people who are asymptomatic.
“One of the big issues that we’re facing is we have a number of people who are probably very mildly symptomatic. Some hardly have any symptoms,” he said. “And to what extent are they carrying the virus and then transmitting the virus. The only way to do that is to really cast a broader net on the testing.”
The process to complete a test performed at the site will take about eight minutes, De-Santis said. But the wait for results likely will take days because the test samples will be processed at private labs.
“It’s not going to be done overnight,” DeSantis said of the test results. “There’s a national backlog.”
The process will speed up, however, when Memorial Healthcare finishes readying its hospital lab to process COVID-19 test samples. Once the lab is operational, DeSantis said, tests taken at the mobile site will be processed at the hospital with results delivered in less time.
“They’ll probably be able to do several hundred a day,” he said, “and then get people the results back quicker.”
DeSantis said if the mobile test site and partnership with Memorial work well, then the state will open more mobile testing sites in partnership with hospitals.
“This is a first step and we just want people to understand expectations,” he said. “The goal is, if this is successful you can expand and then replicate this in other parts of the state.” He said Miami-Dade could be next to have a drive-thru site. Miami-Dade surpassed Broward on Thursday for the most number of confirmed infections — 101. Broward has 96 confirmed cases.
While the state works to build its testing capacity, DeSantis said, the federal government had delivered “a full testing center” to Jacksonville and “they’ve done partial for Miami-Dade and Orlando.”
The testing centers delivered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are fully equipped and capable of processing a large number of COVID-19 tests. DeSantis said one module was delivered to Jacksonville and that one was partially built in Broward.
“Once we get those,” he said of the modules, “that will be the swabs, that will be everything you need. We’re going to be looking to do something in Miami-Dade County as well as Duval and Orange Counties.”
Florida, like the rest of the nation, has been slow to expand testing for the coronavirus because of deficiencies with tests initially distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a shortage of supplies and reagents needed to collect samples and process them.
DeSantis added that the state’s Emergency Operations Center Director Jared Moskowitz had been buying swabs, test kits and protective gear on the private market to help fill shortages of those supplies. He said “venture capitalists” bought many medical supplies in bulk and are selling them for handsome profits.
“We’re right now living through the biggest crunch in demand for various medical supplies that we’ve ever seen in this country’s history,” DeSantis said.
This story was originally published March 19, 2020 at 6:45 PM.
