Drivers waited four hours for a COVID-19 test in Miami Beach. State allows more tests.
Hundreds of people waited in line for up to four hours to be tested for COVID-19 on Thursday at the only state-run testing site in Miami Beach.
Half an hour before the testing center opened Thursday, a line of cars stretched for nearly a mile from the canopied testing site near the Miami Beach Convention Center in South Beach.
With the numbers of positive tests reported in Florida increasing rapidly, the demand for testing at the Convention Center has trended up since the first week of June. On June 19, the city recorded its highest daily tally, 753, since the facility opened in early May. That day, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced a ‘zero tolerance’ policy on businesses that don’t follow COVID-19 rules.
On Thursday, the city broke a new record with 989 tests, a city spokeswoman said. The facility’s daily testing limit of 750 was increased to 1,000 on Thursday following a request to Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, which oversees the testing site.
“I drive by there now and again, and I have never seen anything like that,” Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said. “I think obviously the spike [in cases] has people thinking about this as they should.”
The higher testing numbers in Miami Beach come as testing countywide has trended downward over the last two weeks. All the while, COVID-19 hospitalizations have increased. So, too, have the percentage of positive test results and daily case totals. Adults under 35 years old make up a large share of new cases in Miami-Dade, and hospital administrators have said that patients appear to be younger and less severely ill than those during the first wave of infections in April.
Gelber, who has been in frequent communication with Jared Moskowitz, the state’s director of emergency management, said the state is considering adding up to two additional testing sites in the city to service hospitality workers and tourists on Lincoln Road and Ocean Drive. He said the city is “looking at” empty businesses to host the new testing facilities. Mobile testing sites are also a possibility, he said.
Waiting hours for a test is an “inconvenience,” he added.
A Miami Herald reporter documented her four-and-a-half-hour wait to get tested at the South Beach facility on Thursday, during which she nearly ran out of gas.
“Hundreds, maybe thousands were in line on foot and in car to get a COVID test at the Miami Beach Convention Center,” education reporter Colleen Wright wrote on Twitter. “I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who came with 1/3 gas tank and had to conserve by turning the engine off.”
Wright got in line at 8:30 a.m., half an hour before the testing site opened, and received her test just before 1 p.m.
Just in front of her in line, Wright noticed a car sporting what appeared to be a graduation message for a student at Christopher Columbus High School. The principal of the school, which hosted a drive-thru graduation on Saturday, tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday. That diagnosis prompted Wright, who covered the graduation, to get tested.
On community Facebook groups, Miami Beach residents have posted about the higher demand for testing they have seen this week.
“Today was the most I have seen in the car line,” said Nick Green in the Miami Beach Community group Tuesday. “Literally an hour after open it was still backed up way past 19th [Street] and Washington [Avenue].
“I tried to go twice, it’s sold out fast,” said former City Commission candidate Stephen Cohen. “Failure of government, we should have endless testing all over the city.”
This story was originally published June 25, 2020 at 5:28 PM.
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