Louisville, GA (WJBF)- Since the beginning of the pandemic, every Thursday, the Jefferson County Health Department hosts drive through testing for COVID 19. The nurse in charge says that they do eighty or more tests every week.
“So one of the first things we did was to reach out to our infection control nurse at Jefferson Hospital. Her name is Amy Albright. And we just kid of established what we would do if we got our first positive case,” said Leigh Davis, County Nurse Manager in Jefferson County.
Health officials in Jefferson County started to prepare for the pandemic before the CSRA ever got its first positive case. Davis said that it takes teamwork to keep it all running smoothly. She also said they couldn’t have done it all without Jim Anderson, the Emergency Management Director.
“Jim has been a vital piece, not only in our testing, he helped us get our testing sites up and he also contacts me…we stay in discussion every single day,” Davis added.
News Channel 6’s Kim Vickers talked to one man who said that with the increase in Coronavirus cases, he wanted to be tested just to be sure he wasn’t positive for the virus. He said that he is glad that the county has the site set up, because it’s a long way to Augusta.
“I’m glad I had it done and I didn’t have to come so far to do it. I just want them to get rid of it,” said Donald Eugene Freeman.
Davis says that things didn’t always run so smoothly. Trying to figure out how to keep everything running took a lot of trial and error.
“What we did initially was we set up for two cars, I think it was every ten minutes, and then we found that we were sitting here in between, waiting on cars to get here. But we also wanted to be able to take care of more people, so I think the way we have it set up now, is we do four cars every five minutes, is what we do,” Davis explained.
The Jefferson County Health department is open for testing every Thursday from nine to eleven am.
CVS Pharmacy, MedNow, and Augusta University Health all have COVID 19 testing available.
