Massachusetts officials are looking at how to reconfigure COVID-19 testing efforts to respond to the current distribution of cases around the state and prepare for winter weather, Gov. Charlie Baker said Tuesday.
More than 8.4 million COVID-19 tests had been administered in Massachusetts as of Monday, and the Baker administration recommends getting tested for the virus as part of a series of measures to help limit spread of COVID-19, along with practicing social distancing, wearing masks and maintaining good hygiene.
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There are more than 275 locations — including hospitals, pharmacies and urgent care centers — in Massachusetts offering COVID-19 testing, according to a list maintained by the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. Criteria vary by site, with some requiring appointments, doctor’s referrals, or a pre-existing patient relationship.
The state set up testing sites through its “Stop the Spread” program, which offers free testing to Massachusetts residents, including those who do not have COVID-19 symptoms, in 18 communities that had been identified as hotspots for the virus — Brockton, Chelsea, Everett, Fall River, Framingham, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lynn, Marlborough, Methuen, New Bedford, Randolph, Revere, Salem, Saugus, Springfield, Winthrop and Worcester.
Lawmakers from Cape Cod and Western Massachusetts have criticized the geographical distribution of the state-run sites, describing “testing deserts” that can force their constituents to travel long distances or face lengthy wait-times when seeking a test.
Asked during a Tuesday press conference if there were plans to open additional test sites in those regions, Baker said the state is “in the process of doing two things” around testing.
“Number one, figuring out what we think our distribution of testing capacity needs to look like given the changing nature of where cases have gone around the commonwealth,” he said. “And then the second is, recognizing and understanding that winter’s coming, we may need some capacity to ensure that the testing sites that we do have can survive snowstorms and super cold weather and a lot of the things that we really haven’t had to deal with since we put these up last spring.”
Many test sites are set up outdoors in parks and parking lots, where individuals walk or drive up to a health care provider.
Rep. Mindy Domb, an Amherst Democrat, said in a Monday night press release that she visited the Stop the Spread site in Holyoke last week after hearing from constituents who encountered hours-long waits there. The release said the lawmaker “found hundreds of vehicles that had been waiting several hours and the site was closed to new vehicles” because of limited capacity with two people performing tests and another two inputting registration data.
Domb called for Baker to deploy the National Guard to establish state-supported free testing in every county, labeling the current network of state-supported sites “inadequate to meet the demand for information about one’s status as well as the need to engage residents in taking action to reduce covid transmission.”
“Heated outdoor tents in parking lots would allow a site to double its testing capacity,” she said. “Providers are stretched thin across the state. We need the National Guard to provide us with the testing resources we need.”
Those living in Rockport, Gloucester, Manchester by the Sea, Essex, Ipswich, Rowley, Hamilton and Wenham will be given the opportunity to be tested at home.
All they have to do is contact Beauport Ambulance Service, pay the $175 dollar fee, and set up a time between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m starting on December 7
“Our staff will come into their home provide the COVID testing to collect the samples bring them back submit the results to the laboratory and let the patients know within two to three days the results,” President Beauport Ambulance Services John Morris said.
Baker said Tuesday that “before we make the big decisions about how to do things like deploy the Guard,” he wants to see if a pre-Thanksgiving surge in testing volume tapers off now that the holiday has passed, along with the travel and family gatherings associated with it.
Though state officials sought to discourage Thanksgiving travel and urged people to limit festivities to their own households, Baker said there was a “ton of travel-based testing.”
In the two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, the daily number of tests conducted in Massachusetts exceeded 100,000 on eight days, including two when the totals were above 120,000, Department of Public Health data show.
With three and a half weeks until Christmas, the governor seemed to indicate he didn’t expect a similar spike in testing numbers, describing that day as “not a travel holiday like Thanksgiving.”
“The second thing I would say is, we do need to sort of reconfigure our testing protocols and the way we’re organized to deal with winter, which is really in some respects the thing we’re primarily interested in at this point,” he said.
Eighty-one municipalities fell into the state’s highest danger level for the highly infectious virus in a Department of Public Health report published Friday, an increase from the 63 during the previous week.
Twenty-five communities were new to the red category: Bellingham, Berkley, Boxford, Chelmsford, East Longmeadow, Gardner, Georgetown, Haverhill, Hopedale, Leicester, Lenox, Littleton, Mendon, Merrimac, Middleton, Millbury, Monson, Oak Bluffs, Paxton, Rutland, Upton, Wenham, West Boylston, Westminster and Whitman.
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