Salt Lake County free testing canceled in vulnerable communities, but other options available

People wait in their vehicles for drive-thru COVID-19 testing outside of Glendale Middle School in Salt Lake City on Monday, June 22, 2020. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News

Utah reports 484 new coronavirus cases Wednesday, 30 additional hospitalizations

SALT LAKE CITY — The Salt Lake County Health department hoped for a good turnout for testing events held in some of the communities hardest hit by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Health officials were so overwhelmed by the response to their first event in Glendale Monday afternoon they canceled all seven events planned for this week. In a tweet about the cancellations Tuesday, they said they need to restock and reevaluate how to more efficiently administer tests when hundreds of people show up and will resume the program after the July 4 holiday.

On Wednesday, department spokesman Nicholas Rupp said it doesn’t take 10 days to restock supplies, but health officials want to find a more efficient way to administer the tests and reevaluate how to better reach the community members most impacted.

Due to the overwhelming public response to our testing events targeting geographic areas and populations disproportionately affected by COVID-19, Salt Lake County Health Department must cancel the rest of the scheduled events, including this afternoon’s, (1/2) #SLCo #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/vJf4b3Vyy9

— Salt Lake Health (@SaltLakeHealth) June 23, 2020

“Our testing events are meant to supplement the other testing that is going on around the county and state,” Rupp said, “and specifically those communities that are disproportionately affected. We need to figure out how to better target these events in these communities.

“Our fear is that some of the people who needed to be tested came and when they saw a line that was over 2,000 feet long, said, ‘I’m not waiting.’”

That worry was compounded by the fact that Rupp jumped in to help take down patient information and was entering ZIP codes not just from other communities and counties, but ZIP codes from Wyoming and Nevada, too.

“There was an amazing number of (patients) who came from outside the (targeted) areas,” he said, noting they had people from Weber, Davis, Tooele and along the east side of Salt Lake counties. “They very easily could have and should have gone to testing sites closer to them.”

The targeting is critical to helping officials gain the upper hand on outbreaks in those communities. As of Wednesday afternoon, more than half of Salt Lake County’s 9,460 COVID-19 cases are residents of five communities — Salt Lake City, West Valley City, Taylorsville, Kearns and Magna.

On Wednesday afternoon, Utah Department of Health officials announced that 20% of those tested in the last 24 hours were positive. The state confirmed 484 new cases Wednesday, and 30 additional hospitalizations. Currently 167 people are hospitalized. Of the new positive cases, 253 of those were in Salt Lake County.

There were no new deaths reported, and officials consider 10,334 of the state’s overall 18,784 coronavirus patients to be recovered.

Rupp said the announcement about the Glendale testing went out over Twitter, just as it always does, but this time, the wording may have made it slightly more appealing to people. The announcement said “Free COVID testing — All are welcome to get tested, whether ill or not.”

It should have stipulated that people without symptoms should have had contact with someone who tested positive for at least 10 minutes in order to be tested.

Still, Rupp said they based their calculations on what they needed — including personnel — on past experiences with events like Monday’s.

“It was a miscalculation on our part on what we’d need,” Rupp said. “We had no idea we’d see over 400 people.”

In other testing events the county has offered, they’ve administered between 75 and 80 tests.

“That’s very sustainable,” he said, adding they expected as many as 125 people Monday because of how widely the announcement was shared on social media. “Events lasting three, sometimes close to four hours are what we’ve had.”

Monday night’s event was double that.

“We were scheduled to go from 3 to 7 p.m, and the staff left at 11 p.m.,” Rupp said, noting they administered 444 tests. “The staff is wearing protective gear, and they can’t be in (that gear), in that heat for long periods of time. So we had to change the staff out regularly so they didn’t get heat exhaustion. We didn’t have the staff to be working that long.”

As the local and state health departments attempt to do a better job offering testing to Utah’s most impacted communities, they also grapple with how best to offer those opportunities.

For those communities disproportionately impacted, there can be many barriers to testing — location, perceived cost or insurance requirements, language barriers, fears about what happens with a positive test, and privacy concerns — and most agree testing is a vital first step in controlling any outbreaks.

“Testing is critical,” said Sen. Luz Escamilla, whose district includes parts of west Salt Lake City and West Valley City. She helped organize a COVID Community partnership initiative that attempts to solve those issues in cooperation with the communities suffering. “Without testing, you don’t even know where the issues are,” she said.

The problem is that where and under what circumstances a person can be tested can be confusing.

“There is kind of a convoluted system when it comes to testing,” said Escamilla, who understands the outbreak in a very personal way as she tested positive and sought treatment at a hospital. “There are multiple entities doing testing.”

Entities administering tests include the Utah State Public Health Lab, ARUP, University of Utah, Intermountain Healthcare and then each individual health districts.

As of Tuesday, about 50% of the state’s positive cases are residents of Salt Lake County. Of those, about 56% of the state’s hospitalizations and 65% of the state’s deaths are in Salt Lake County. Latinos make up 30% of the population, but they account for 43% of the positive cases.

Rupp pointed out there are 17 other places where people can be tested, and it is free if a person doesn’t have insurance. But only four of those facilities are in the communities targeted by this program. There are three in the southwest corner of the valley where a fraction of the cases have been reported.

Escamilla said canceling an event may confuse people even more.

“I don’t think we’ve made it easy and accessible for people (to get tested),” she said. “For vulnerable populations, we’ve been working with community partners, and we’ve been making it as simple as we can. We have to get any barriers out of the way.”

When the state conducted mobile testing on the Navajo Nation, it conducted hundreds of tests a day — in one case nearly 700 tests — and it did so by asking patients to stay in their cars and utilize a drive-thru approach. Escamilla said the testing events they’ve participated in haven’t just been located in disproportionately impacted neighborhoods, they’ve let community organizations disseminate the information, target people in need and deal with any questions or fears.

“They’re the ones with the relationships,” she said. “There are real challenges, and it’s complicated.”

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