July 8, 2020 — As the pandemic drags on, the logistics of getting tested in rural parts of a rural county continue to be cumbersome.
More than 12,700 tests for covid-19 have been done in Mendocino County, between public health, commercial providers, and a lab at UCSF, which, until the first of this month, was processing 100 surveillance tests a day from clinics in the county.
Test results from Optum Serve in Ukiah are taking a week to ten days to come back, and on the South Coast, where the county had its first known case of the virus, the clinic and local government are scrambling to get people tested.
Paul Andersen, with the City of Point Arena, said the city started coordinating testing efforts with Public Health and Redwood Coast Medical Services, which covers the coast in Mendocino and Sonoma Counties, in June. There have been about 260 tests in Point Arena since the beginning of the pandemic, which he said is “seriously inadequate to the need, especially on the South Coast,” which has a population of roughly three to four thousand people. For the testing event on June 29 at the City Hall/Veterans’ Building, the city expected 100 tests, which would be administered for the first half hour to frontline workers and after that to the general public. But Andersen says there were only 60 tests, and they were gone within 20 minutes. “We were unable to perform any tests on the general public, because we didn’t have any left,” he said.
Anderson gets it that this is a national issue. So does Gowan Batist, of Fortunate Farm, which grows and sells organic food in Caspar. She wanted to make sure everyone on the small family farm got tested before they reopened. Her mother, who manages the business, was one of the people who couldn’t get a test in Point Arena. After not being able to get tested on the coast, she and the other workers decided to get tested at Optum Serve in Ukiah. “It was clean, they were wonderful,” she said of the experience at Optum Serve; “but, you know, we still had to drive about three hours round trip to get tested for an actual test that takes about 15 seconds...it’s a pretty big hardship, for a small business that’s based on the coast, to actually make it out there.” She added that it took over a week to get results.
Chloe Guazzone, the Executive Director at the Anderson Valley Health Center, wants to make it easy for people in her part of the county to get tested. The Health Center is offering fifty tests on a first-come, first serve basis every Thursday for the rest of July, from 9:30-11 am at the high school. The Health Center has done 350 surveillance tests, in five different events, three of them for vineyard workers in the valley. The lab at UCSF, which previously accepted 100 tests a day from Mendocino County, now takes only 50 a day, Tuesday through Saturday, and 100 each on Sunday and Monday. If Anderson Valley runs out on a Thursday, Guazzone says, she could have an additional weekend day with double the number of tests. Logistically, “It’s been quite difficult to figure out,” she reflected. “Once we’ve got our set of 100 surveillance tests, or however many we’ve done that day, we package them off. Prior to this extension of the contract, the county was picking them up and delivering them through their own courier services. Now we are providing our own courier service, and I believe we’ll be moving to shipping them via FedEx, which is a lot easier to arrange than having somebody drive down to San Francisco each time.”
Of course, driving long distances is the thing that makes it hard to get tested if you live a long way from a population center. It’s especially hard if your car registration expired while the DMV was closed and you needed a covid test, which is what happened to Gowan Batist. “You know, we’re having multiple big, bureaucratic systems that are slow and difficult to navigate, that we’re all being impacted by at once,” she said. “So it’s not just one obstacle. It’s like a cascade failure of obstacles for a lot of us.”Andersen’s advice? “Contact your local representatives and push for more testing. It’s really the only way we’re going to get it. It was really the only way we were able to get tests here, is keep pushing, pushing, pushing.”