The coronavirus testing center set up Wednesday in Leflore County stayed busy, with a continuous flow of people getting tested for the virus.
The testing was to be available for the first 500 people, with or without symptoms, on Wednesday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Leflore County Civic Center. The Delta Health Center, which provided the testing process, ran out of tests around 4:30 p.m.
And although a lot of people were fearful of the test, there were no complications throughout the day, according to people involved in the process.
Fred Randle, director of the Greenwood-Leflore Emergency Management Agency, said most of the people tested were from Leflore County, although some came from Sunflower and Tallahatchie counties as well.
Randle said he expects the Delta Heath Center to return soon.
“Once they get more tests, they will come back, and we will be able to provide for our citizens,” he said.
John Fairman, CEO of Delta Health Center, says the turnout shows what the citizens want.
“We had to shut the line off,” he said. “That just indicates the level of need and desire to be tested and to know their status.”
Fairman said they have done almost 9,000 tests throughout the Delta. But now the national supply has been interrupted, and it is taking longer for people to get their results back.
“We were getting results back (in) from one to three days,” Fairman said. “Now it’s 10 days, and on Monday we were all told …that starting tomorrow (Thursday) we will only start back testing people who are symptomatic.”
This is disheartening to Fairman, who said that of the people that tested positive for COVID-19, 65% of them were asymptomatic and had no distinguishable illness.
•Contact Adam Bakst at 581-7233 or abakst@gwcommonwealth.com. Twitter: @AdamBakst_GWCW
