Whatcom County to increase COVID-19 testing Friday
Whatcom County is making plans to increase testing of residents for COVD-19 as the new coronavirus pandemic continues to spread locally.
Testing will be “low-barrier” so people will not need a doctor’s referral, the Whatcom County Health Department said in a statement Tuesday afternoon, July 7.
It will serve people with or without health insurance.
“This will be available to anyone who needs or wants to be tested,” Health Director Erika Lautenbach told the Whatcom County Council at a meeting Tuesday afternoon.
Drive-thru testing will be Friday and Saturday, July 10 and 11, at the Civic Athletic Complex in Bellingham, the statement said.
Hours and further dates weren’t disclosed in the statement.
“There’s a lot of details to be worked out,” she told the council. “This is fluid and it requires pretty heavy staffing.”
Testing could go to seven days a week if needed, she said.
Lautenbach said the new testing service is a joint operation among Whatcom Unified Command, the Health Department, Northwest Laboratory, the city of Bellingham, county EMS services and the county’s medical reserve corps.
She said the drive-thru service is in response to the number of local residents who were going to Skagit County for tests because they were unable to get tested near their homes.
Whatcom residents received nearly 26% — or 755 — of the 2,953 tests done June 22-July 2 at the site overseen by the Skagit County Health Department, according to information provided to The Bellingham Herald by Skagit officials.
Skagit County officials opened their drive-thru testing site to the public at Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon on April 27. In mid-May, they expanded testing to people who don’t have symptoms, known as asymptomatic, of COVID-19, but feel they need to be tested.
Dr. Greg Stern, the Whatcom County health officer, said Tuesday there’s much to be learned about the virus — including the ideal time to get tested — because it’s still early in the pandemic.
“We want to make sure that anyone with symptoms, even mild symptoms, can get tested,” Stern said. (But) we may not be able to maintain that open threshold if we have to prioritize in the future.”
He advised waiting until about seven days after a possible exposure to get tested.
Meanwhile, the county continues to see rising cases among people under age 30 and even under 20, Lautenbach said Tuesday.
“We continue to see trends skewed toward North County in terms of cases and those cases increasingly have more contacts,” she said.
Lautenbach said those people have gone to their jobs and infected co-workers and in general have done a poor job staying isolated and quarantined.
Stern said the recent increase in cases isn’t just from more testing, citing numbers that show positive infection rates continue to hover around 3%, even with more testing.
He warned that while younger residents account for the majority of positive tests and that they weather the virus more effectively, hospitalization rates could rise as infections spread among older friends and family members.
“I anticipate hospital rates will be going up just as they have in Texas, Arizona and Florida,” he said. “We let our guard down.”
Both Stern and Lautenbach said that the best defense against the virus is good hand hygiene, social distancing and wearing a mask or face covering at public indoor spaces such as stores.
Bellingham Herald reporter Kie Relyea contributed to this story.
This story was originally published July 7, 2020 at 3:18 PM.
