New walk-up coronavirus testing sites coming to Sacramento County next week
Sacramento County is ramping up coronavirus testing capacity, with plans to open three new COVID-19 testing walk-up clinics in underserved communities by the end of next week.
The additional testing sites will be a key way for public health officials to track and tamp down on new potential coronavirus outbreaks, as California begins to slowly ease stay-at-home restrictions. Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state should hit 60,000 to 80,000 daily tests before reopening businesses.
New appointment-only clinics in Sacramento will launch at the La Familia Counseling Center, Robertson Community Center and St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church by the end of next week, according to county Public Health Officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye. Anyone will be eligible to sign-up, regardless of whether they have COVID-19 symptoms.
As the state began moving into Phase 2, which would allow some businesses to open, “it’s very important for us to readily have testing available so when people identify as having symptoms or having been in contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19, we can easily get them tested,” Kasirye said.
Sacramento County has been operating a free drive-through testing site at Cal Expo since March with Verily, a private research company owned by Google’s parent company. Hundreds have already been tested there.
But the new walk-in clinics in North City Farms, Del Paso Heights and Oak Park will give people without access to cars the ability to get tested, Kasirye said, and target underserved communities with less access to hospital or private lab testing.
The county has not released information yet on how to sign up for appointments. Officials are still finalizing logistics, Kasirye said, but residents will be able to seek appointments either online or by phone.
Next week will be a soft launch for the test sites, Kasirye said, offering about 25 appointments a day. Over the next few weeks, however, she expects to see 150 to 200 tests conducted a day at each site.
Between drive-through testing at Cal Expo, private and public labs and hospitals, Sacramento County currently tests between 1,500 to 2,000 people each day, county health director Dr. Peter Beilenson said during the telephone town hall Thursday.
It’s a significant increase from where the county was during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in March, when it was running samples from just 20 to 25 people.
Under Newsom’s criteria for when counties can reopen sooner than the rest of the state, Sacramento County would need to test more than 2,300 people a day.
The new community testing locations in Sacramento are separate from the more than 80 new testing sites across California the state opened this week, in partnership with private health care company OptumServe. Newsom announced that expanded testing last month would target harder-to-reach Californians in both urban or rural areas.
Testing at La Familia Counseling Center and Robertson Community Center will be done in partnership with UC Davis Medical Center, Kasirye said. The county is partnering with the state to acquire tests for St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church, she said.
Public health experts say that bolstered testing capacity, combined with expanded contact-tracing efforts — the ability for disease detectives to investigate those who who may have been in recent contact with an infected person — will be critical for monitoring the ongoing spread of the virus.
Kasirye said that additional testing sites have been identified that could launch in the coming weeks based on the success and popularity of the three sites.
In Sacramento County, the coronovirus has infected more than 1,100 people, and killed 50 people. Oak Park in particular has one of the highest infection rates in the county.
This story has been updated to correct the location of a new coronavirus testing site.
This story was originally published May 9, 2020 at 5:00 AM.