Manatee County urgent care center starts its own drive-thru coronavirus testing
While the Manatee Department of Health has admitted to having limited specimen collection supplies to test for the new coronavirus, one local urgent care facility has stepped up and is now offering drive-thru testing.
On Monday, Ellenton Urgent Care, 4015 U.S. 301, began offering drive-thru testing outside its facility.
“We’re working with Quest and LabCorp to provide testing for the community,” physician assistant Alexander Petreas said.
Anyone wanting to be tested needs to call the clinic at 941-531-2800 to be pre-screened and then schedule an appointment. Appointments are available between 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 pm.
Last week, the health department held a 4-day drive-thru testing event at the Bradenton Area Convention Center in Palmetto, testing 197 people. The testing was limited because the department said they only had 200 specimen collection kits and didn’t know when they could get more because Manatee County hasn’t been deemed to be in critical need of testing.
Manatee County isn’t considered to be in critical condition because it doesn’t have more positive cases, even though testing has been limited. As of Tuesday morning, there had been 402 people in Manatee tested, with 48 residents testing positive and seven tests still pending.
Unlike testing elsewhere, Ellenton Urgent Care is being more liberal with the required criteria. Priority will be provided to medical personnel with symptoms but the clinic will also test if anyone has all the symptoms.
Ellenton Urgent Care began the drive-thru testing with 75 specimen collection kits. Quest and LabCorp have agreed to continue to provide them with more kits as needed in increments of 50.
“The lab just wants to see how quickly we are going through them and they will adjust to our needs,” Petreas said. “We are hoping to get the results back in 48 to 72 hours, now that the tests are going to Miami, not Virginia. So hopefully we can get the people results very quickly and have them in isolation a much shorter period of time.”
Quest and LabCorp have told the clinic that it will provide additional kits the next day when ordered.
“We’ll continue to test and schedule while we have supplies,” said Elizabeth Young, Petreas’s wife and co-owner of the clinic.
Ellenton Urgent Care is looking to not only continue testing, but is looking to get the new rapid tests for COVID-19 and other respiratory panels being approved by the FDA.
“We are seeing if we can get those in the next week,” Petreas said. “We’ve always just tried to take care of the community the best we can.”
The testing is being paid for by the patients’ insurance carriers. Because of the uncertainty of costs, cash-paying patients are not being taken currently.
“We just started hounding the labs and letting them know that we are definitely wanted to do this and we just stuck with it and pestering them until they would send us the swabs so we could start the testing,” Petreas said. “Through perseverance, we annoyed them enough to get the swabs.”
