‘We can’t quarantine forever’: Can new walk-up testing site push Miami Beach to reopen?
The mayor of Miami Beach doesn’t feel sick.
But on Thursday, he was one of three city leaders to be tested for the novel coronavirus at a new state-run site in South Beach.
The message was a “little tickle to the top of your nose” can go a long way to eventually reopening the city’s economy. But first, Mayor Dan Gelber said, the city must see how COVID-19 is spreading in its community by testing anyone — even those without symptoms — who want to be tested.
“No one is going to be turned away,” he said at a press conference outside the new walk-up and drive-thru site at the corner of 17th Street and Convention Center Drive. “We want more people to be tested.”
When the site opens to the public on Friday, it will be the first state-run testing center in Florida to offer both walk-up and drive-thru testing, according to the Florida National Guard, which is operating the center with the Florida Department of Health and the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
The site, which is open to anyone regardless of residence, will be open seven days a week and offer up to 400 tests per day, with the flexibility to offer more tests. It will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. No appointments are needed, and anyone older than 18 years old or children accompanied by a guardian can be tested for free. A photo ID is required.
It was latest expansion of testing options in Miami-Dade. On Friday, the county announced lower age limits for two free drive-up sites: Tamiami Park and the South Dade Government Center.
Appointments are required for both by calling 305-499-8767. While they were previously limited to adults, now those two county sites are accepting appointments for residents 12 and older. Children need parental approval for tests. The testing is available to anyone who wants to be tested, and COVID-19 symptoms are no longer required.
The Miami Beach site opened to city staff and first responders on Thursday. Commissioner Michael Góngora and City Manager Jimmy Morales also received tests. They did not immediately receive results.
Gelber said the state’s emergency planners selected the municipal parking lot near the Miami Beach Convention Center because medical staff had already been stationed at the center, which was converted into a coronavirus field hospital in April.
It has yet to see a single patient.
‘Sufficient tests’
Gelber, who worried if old nose injuries from playing basketball would make his test extra uncomfortable, assured the public on Thursday that getting testing is quick and painless.
After encouraging even the young and healthy without exposure to the virus to seek testing, Gelber said the new site would have “sufficient tests.”
The city’s previous testing center, a privately-run drive-thru site on Collins Avenue, recently closed down after test numbers declined, he said. Testing had been limited to symptomatic patients or those who had been exposed to the virus.
The new testing site offers only standard coronavirus testing, but Gelber said that as the state expands its antibody testing, the new South Beach site may eventually provide the serological test, which “detects the body’s immune response to the infection caused by the virus rather than detecting the virus itself,” according to the Food and Drug Administration.
Antibody testing is available at the Hard Rock Stadium testing site.
“My expectation is that if there is an antibody test that will have some utility in our community that it will become available here at some point,” Gelber said, speaking behind a rainbow-colored face mask. “Right now, I think [the state] believes the most important testing is the testing they have right now.”
Morales said testing as many people as possible in the community is a “critical” step to reopening businesses and beaches.
“Even the strategy to reopen requires we be able to test anybody who is symptomatic and then do very robust contact tracing,” he said.
The administration has said that its two-phase plan to reopen the city after nearly two months of lockdown requires a 14-day decrease in the presence of the virus in Miami-Dade County and an increased capacity for testing and contact tracing — the labor-intensive method of tracking down newly infected people and their close contacts.
Health officials in Miami-Dade County said they have 175 employees doing contact tracing work, including 16 students.
Under pressure from Commissioner Ricky Arriola, who has asked the city for the specific “signals” it needs to reopen, Morales has asked his recently appointed health advisers what medical criteria the city should rely on when deciding when to reopen businesses and other sectors of public life.
Morales said Wednesday during a virtual town hall event that the experts have pointed to two criteria — new hospitalizations and the percentage of positive test results as being especially critical when discussing reopening.
‘Spike’ in new hospitalizations
The number of COVID-19 patients at Miami-Dade’s hospitals has decreased in the last two weeks, from 688 on April 24 to 591 on Wednesday, but new daily hospitalizations have increased.
Morales said he was troubled by the “spike.”
The positive testing rate in Miami-Dade was 13 percent on Wednesday, higher than the state’s 8 percent rate, according to data Morales presented to the City Commission. Morales said the county should be striving for a 4 percent rate.
“That curve is more flat than it is downward at this point,” Morales said. “We probably want to bring that down a bit more.”
When the city does reopen, retail stores will be the first businesses to swing open their doors, Morales said. Restaurants may open in a piecemeal manner, with those with more outdoor seating given priority. Beaches and hotels will be a part of the Phase Two plan following sustained positive metrics.
Increased contact tracing must go hand in hand with a positive trend in key medical metrics. Morales will present his findings officially to the City Commission during its weekly meeting on Friday morning.
“We can’t quarantine forever,” Morales said. “So what you want to do when you open is you want to be able to quickly identify people who are symptomatic, test them quickly and then if they test positive, have an abundant number of people doing contact tracing ...”
This story was originally published May 7, 2020 at 6:09 PM.
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