Coral Gables residents want COVID-19 testing in their city. Getting it is a struggle.
Coral Gables residents aren’t shy about making requests of their government. In recent weeks, many have pressed local leaders: Why don’t we have a COVID-19 testing site here?
During a virtual city commission meeting Tuesday, not everyone was satisfied when Coral Gables Fire Chief Marcos De La Rosa explained that, for now, the city is helping residents set up appointments elsewhere in Miami-Dade County but has no immediate plans to open its own drive-thru site.
“Our residents are used to being taken care of by our city,” said resident Maria Cruz. “This business of facilitating us to go to other places [to get tested] is not what the residents want to hear.”
The commissioners heeded those cries, voting unanimously to direct City Manager Peter Iglesias to come up with a plan to provide testing. But there’s no guarantee it will become a reality. Iglesias said his administration has already looked at “every single way to try to get testing here,” to no avail.
“It’s very difficult to find anybody who really wants to do it,” he said.
City officials said private labs and healthcare clinics have been reluctant to open a new drive-thru site in Coral Gables because they aren’t convinced enough people would show up to make it financially feasible. Around the county, testing requirements have been relaxed at some sites as fewer people clamor for appointments.
“My understanding from the city manager and the fire chief is it’s hard to get a lab to come out and set up the whole infrastructure unless you have a certain critical mass of people,” Commissioner Michael Mena told the Miami Herald. “If 10 or 20 people are coming out a day, it’s not necessarily worth their while.”
De La Rosa said the city’s efforts to send residents to other sites in the county has left “no indication that our residents have not been able to address their testing needs.” Coral Gables has a hotline to help seniors with their needs, including in-home testing for COVID-19, but the city has provided tests for just three people so far.
Coral Gables Mayor Raúl Valdés-Fauli voted in favor of the city manager’s devising a testing plan, but he said it would be “frivolous” for the city to provide testing to young, healthy residents who don’t have symptoms “just because they have nothing better to do.”
Health experts say asymptomatic carriers can spread the disease.
Mena responded that “nobody suggested” every resident should be tested. “Right now, we’re not providing testing to anybody,” he said.
Some other cities are testing
Coral Gables wouldn’t be the first city in Miami-Dade to buy coronavirus tests for its residents. The city of Miami, whose population of 470,000 is about 10 times that of Coral Gables, procured nasal swab tests for a drive-thru site at Charles Hadley Park and for home-bound seniors, training its own EMTs to administer them.
But that approach wouldn’t be feasible for a fire department of Coral Gables’ size, said Iglesias. Instead, the city would prefer to find partners to help set up appointments, staff the site, and administer and process tests.
“The greatest challenge is identifying a provider that has the expertise and resources to operate a site that doesn’t require redirecting city staff from their essential services,” De La Rosa told the Herald in an email.
Only one Miami-Dade municipality smaller than Coral Gables has pulled it off: Key Biscayne, an island south of Miami Beach with about 13,000 residents. The village coordinated with a local nonprofit, the Key Biscayne Community Foundation, as well as Miami-based lab BioCollections Worldwide, to open a site April 14.
It helped that BioCollections offered to be a one-stop shop, administering the tests and processing the results, said Melissa White, the nonprofit’s executive director. The village’s fire chief connected with the company April 9 or 10, White said, and a walk-through of the potential site at St. Agnes Catholic Church followed on April 13 before appointments began the next day.
As of Wednesday, more than 380 people had been tested, most of whom are 65 and older and experiencing symptoms of COVID-19. For everyone who meets those criteria, the village is covering the cost — about $75 per test, according to Mayor Mike Davey. The village’s initial order was for 500 tests.
“Our residents wanted to get a sense of where we are as a community,” Davey said. “We felt we owed it to them, and we felt it was a good step to sort of determine where we are in terms of our infection rates.”
De La Rosa, the Coral Gables fire chief, said “no option is off the table,” including a potential government partnership with a nonprofit like the one in Key Biscayne.
“Since the onset of this crisis, we have been evaluating several options to bring testing to our residents,” he said, “and we continue to do so.”
Federal funding
A federal law passed in March offers reimbursement to healthcare providers that offer free testing to the uninsured, and private insurance companies have generally waived testing fees.
Still, there are costs associated with procuring the tests and operating a site. Government and healthcare officials hope those will ultimately be reimbursed by the federal government, but nothing is guaranteed.
“The federal government has a credit card they can use and we don’t,” said Mena, the Coral Gables commissioner. “We have to get very creative with our budget.”
But “push comes to shove,” Mena said, “we can figure out a way to pay for [testing] ourselves.
“We’ve heard from enough residents that I think it’s a service that we should be looking to provide,” he said.
More testing needed as economy reopens
The options for Miami-Dade County residents to get tested have expanded substantially since the novel coronavirus started to spread in South Florida. There are drive-thru sites scattered across the region, including at Marlins Park about five miles from Coral Gables.
Private medical practices are increasingly getting access to their own tests, and the county is conducting randomized blood sampling of residents to better understand how many people have already had COVID-19 and recovered. On Wednesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced two new contracts with labs that will increase the state’s testing capacity by 18,000 samples per day by using rapid tests.
But even now, only about 64,000 Miami-Dade residents have been tested, according to the Florida Department of Health. That’s less than 2.5% of the county’s population. While most drive-thru sites have started taking appointments for people 18 and older, they still must have symptoms to get tested.
Some officials at the federal, state and county levels are eager to start reopening public spaces and businesses. In the coming days, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez will open parks, golf courses, boat ramps and marinas with restrictions in place to enforce social distancing, the first phase in a longer-term plan to return to a semblance of normalcy.
But city governments will still be authorized to keep stricter measures in place if they choose to do so. Some could choose to try to get more residents tested before making decisions about the local economy.
“We are Coral Gables, and we will not open up fully without assurances that we will not fall into a contagion downward spiral,” Valdés-Fauli, the city mayor, said during Tuesday’s meeting.
County Commissioner Esteban Bovo, who helped spearhead an effort earlier this month to bring COVID-19 testing to Amelia Earhart Park in Hialeah, said more testing should “go hand in hand” with reopening.
“If economic reignition is linked to testing, more testing could help us reopen our economy,” Bovo said. For that reason, he said, “I would bet you’re gonna see more testing sites start to open.”
But opening a site is a tall order. To bring the Hialeah location to fruition, Bovo coordinated with state officials, a Florida-based lab called Testing Matters, Solis Health, and even a local technology company that offered up a phone number — 305-COVID19 — for appointments.
“Sites require a lot of logistical efforts,” he said. “It’s a challenge.”
This story was originally published April 22, 2020 at 6:34 PM.
