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Date: 1/27/2022
SOUTHWICK — Health Director Tom Fitzgerald said last week that Southwick is closer to setting up a local COVID-19 testing site, after he found a testing company that can fit the needs of the town.
Fitzgerald said that the plan to work with RN Wellness to set up a mass testing site in Southwick fell through, as the company does not do drive-through testing sites, like Fitzgerald wanted. When that didn’t work out, he reached out to Curative, a company that runs COVID-19 testing sites across the country and would be able to set up a drive-through operation.
Fitzgerald said that the site will originally only be open for one day, likely a Saturday, and will be open to everybody, even residents of other communities. Though it would be a drive-through, it will be by appointment only, which Fitzgerald said could mitigate the need for traffic control measures.
If the testing site is run smoothly and gets a lot of use, Fitzgerald said that it could become a regular, weekly site.
Though at-home tests have recently become popular, that has resulted in them becoming scarce, keeping up the demand for PCR laboratory tests that typically take between one and three days to return a result.
Another benefit to lab tests, from an administrative standpoint, is that their results are reported to local authorities and help provide the Board of Health with more accurate data on the spread of COVID-19 in town. Because at-home tests have no reporting mechanism, any positive results are not included in reports from local boards of health or the state Department of Public Health.
With the addition of more laboratory testing capacity in Southwick, Fitzgerald said that the data the Health Department receives can be at least a little more reliable.