Drive-through coronavirus testing set up for area first responders
— Michael Carnes for the Laurel Advocate
WAYNE — A large three-stall garage in the Wayne County Roads Department lot in Wayne served as a makeshift drive-through testing area last week as health officials hoped to get a better understanding of how the Coronavirus is moving through the area.
More than 60 people living in the Northeast Nebraska Public Health District, most of them members of first-responder communities in Wayne, Dixon, Cedar and Thurston counties, made their way into the drive-through setup to get tested for the virus, according to NNPHD director Julie Rother.
“We’re trying to reach out across the health district and identify a variety of people who are symptomatic and asymptomatic,” Rother said. “One of the things we’re seeing is that we are one of the only health districts in the state with only one positive case. Our providers have been testing, but the virus hasn’t really shown its face around here yet.”
The health department had permission from the state’s testing lab to conduct 68 tests during Wednesday’s drive-through procedure, and Rother said the health district reached out to health clinics in the four-county area to line up people who might be showing symptoms of the virus.
“We talked to clinics to try and identify people who may be mildly symptomatic, but not enough to warrant COVID testing,” she said. “We’re also looking at our first responders to make sure they don’t have something with them that could be a menace to the public.”
The three-stage testing area was set up so patients could be tested without leaving their vehicles.
After being properly identified outside, they drive into the building for a quick pre-screening, advanced to a second station to register, and then moved on to the final station to give a swabbed specimen before exiting the building.
Nebraska Army and Air Force National Guard representatives worked in all phases while wearing M-95 masks. Testers were fully gowned and covered, wearing 2-3 pair of sterile latex gloves, and went through numerous decontamination processes as a group rotated through to help speed the process along during the two-hour testing.
NNPHD has been involved in Coronavirus testing since the first case in Northeast Nebraska was announced March 9 in nearby Knox County. This testing procedure was expected to give the district, and the state, more data to know how the virus is being spread in Northeast Nebraska.
“The big thing is that we want to know if the virus is here more than we know now. We want to understand more about its presence in our community,” Rother said.
Of the 68 tests conducted at the Wayne County site Wednesday morning, none were positive tests, although a positive test in Dixon County was reported late Monday morning by the NNPHD, bringing the total in the four-county region to two.
Rother said the effort being made has been the result of a lot of help from people around the four-county area.
“These people have been fantastic,” she said. “We’ve added to staff and have had a lot of volunteers helping out with dealing with the equipment that’s come in. We have to unpack and repack everything to send out to each of our partners, and it’s a big process. There’s a good network of people out there.”
