Grand Prairie to get drive-thru COVID-19 testing, Tarrant County looking at options
Drive-through testing for COVID-19 is expected to soon be available in Grand Prairie, and officials in Tarrant County are discussing options for a testing network in collaboration with local hospitals.
Andrew Fortune, the assistant to Grand Prairie’s city manager, said on a tele-town hall Monday night, that The Theatre at Grand Prairie will be Dallas County’s second location for drive-through testing sites.
“They will see predominately first responders and those within the high-risk populations listed on the CDC’s website,” Fortune said on the call. “We’re anticipating that starting up toward the end of the week.”
In an email following the town hall, Fortune wrote that the site will be provided in collaboration with federal, county and local stakeholders, and referred questions on hours and more to Dallas County, which is taking the lead on setting parameters for the site. A drive-through COVID-19 testing program began Monday for patients of Parkland Health and Hospital System in Dallas.
The call was organized by the office of Rep. Chris Turner, a Democrat from Grand Prairie, and featured local officials, including Tarrant County Public Health Director Vinny Taneja who said that discussions are in place to bring drive-through testing to Tarrant County.
In an interview following Monday’s town hall, Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley confirmed that the county is discussing a drive-through testing option, but envisions it will be a “triage tree” network that will involve the county, hospital systems and private labs working in conjunction with one another.
“What we’re trying to do is develop a countywide program that would be consistent, and would be able to not (have) one location be overrun,” Whitley said. “But have a backup and have a place where we go from spot to spot.”
Whitley said the goal is for Tarrant County residents to be able to either call a hotline or fill out a form online sharing their symptoms and circumstances that they feel warrant testing. If they may be eligible for testing, a physician or nurse would screen them by asking additional questions, and if it’s determined the person meets testing criteria, they would be assigned an appointment and location to be administered a COVID-19 test.
“They will not be in a doctor’s office. They will not be in the emergency room,” Whitley said, stressing that officials do not want healthcare facilities to be overrun. “They will be (in) a special facility. It could be an office-type environment. It could be in a large parking garage, or something along that type of lines. We’re not there yet.”
Whitley said he hopes that the collaboration will allow for patients to be directed to testing locations based on availability, so one does not get overwhelmed with long lines.
A handful of hospital systems in the area had their first meeting to discuss logistics Monday, Whitley said, and on the town hall call, Taneja said a few locations had already volunteered to act as potential sites for testing.
Whitley said it would likely be a mix of both county and private labs handling the tests. In the call with constituents, Taneja said Tarrant County’s Public Health lab would struggle to handle the volume of tests that come with drive-through testing.
“Because you’re talking thousands of specimens collected in a short amount of time. We just don’t have that testing capability on hand. We’re very limited,” Taneja said. “Commercial labs are usually bigger networks. They can handle thousands of samples, but they’re just bringing their capabilities online, and we need to understand and make sure that they have that available.”
Whitley said that while the county expects to ramp up its testing capabilities, the public health department is not geared to react to a pandemic every day, which is why hospitals are being asked to collaborate in the system being developed. The county’s lab first started with 800 testing kits, received roughly another 1,000 early last week, and has 4,000 as of Monday, Whitley said.
“We’re not overrun yet. We hope that we won’t be, but we are going to prepare for if we are,” said Whitley, who is reaching out to private labs to better understand the scope of their testing capabilities.
Tarrant County reported its fifth positive case of COVID-19 Monday, and for the first time officials shared a breakdown of which cities case were reported in. Whitley said he did not have the number of tests conducted overall by Tarrant County Public Health’s North Texas Regional Laboratory.
He did share that of the tests the county’s lab has conducted, 51% have been on Tarrant County residents, while the remaining 49% have been on residents from one of the other 32 counties the lab serves.
San Antonio was the first city in Texas to launch a drive-through testing site, and sites have also launched in Dallas and Austin, with more expected in other large cities like Houston. At a press conference Monday in San Antonio, Gov. Greg Abbott said there will be “an exponential increase in the number of people that test positive on a daily basis,” as the state’s testing capabilities grow.
As of Monday afternoon, there have been at least 57 confirmed COVID-19 cases in 15 Texas counties, not including repatriated individuals being monitored at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.
More than 200 Texans have been tested in public health labs and by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 300 Texans are in the process of being tested, Abbott said.
This story was originally published March 16, 2020 at 9:19 PM.
