On the ground in Huber Heights Thursday, part of that effort to change course was a free testing site offered by Public Health - Dayton & Montgomery County.
Lines formed outside Rose Music Center, 6800 Executive Blvd., Thursday morning as people waited for the site to open, where testing was available from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. People did not need to make an appointment or have a doctor’s recommendation to be tested.
“The reality is in every county we have community spread. And it is increasing at a rapid rate. So we’re at about four, five, times more cases per day than we were just a month or so ago,” said Dr. Michael Dohn, Public Health - Dayton & Montgomery County medical director. “This means there are a lot of people out there who have been exposed one way or another.”
Dohn said ones that have had a lot of recent exposure to other people are at higher risk of being infectious and unwittingly spreading the virus. He said people staying at home with controlled contacts might not benefit as much from testing, since they have had limited exposure.
“On the other hand, people that have been involved in social activities, that have been to bars, that have been to demonstrations recently, that have been congregating with other people, those are the ones we would like to think about coming and getting a test,” Dohn said.
Positive tests let people know they are infectious and need to isolate before they continue to spread the virus and fuel the epidemic. When a person tests positive, it also allows their close contacts to know they have been exposed, could also be infectious, and need to quarantine. The epidemic gets smaller when infectious people are quickly isolated.
In addition, testing allows public health to get an indication of how widespread the coronavirus is in a community and where it is spreading, which lets officials target their response tactics. For example, one of the indicators the DeWine administration is tracking is what percent of positive tests are in congregated settings like nursing homes and jails. If the overwhelming majority were in these settings, that would need a more targeted response than now, when over half of cases in Montgomery County are outside these settings.
The number of tests performed has been steadily climbing in the state. Ohio Department of Health reported 25,750 tests performed with 6.4% of tests coming back positive on July 14, which was the latest data available as of Thursday. On June 14, there were 8,780 tests performed in Ohio.
There were delays in the results of the tests performed at the recent pop-up events performed in Xenia and Dayton, as the labs got backed up with tests from other places at the same time.
Dohn said at this point the pop-up test sites and other testing are better integrated and that he would anticipate results in a few days from the site but did not know definitively when results would be back.
Bessie Barnett, who was waiting to be tested, said she came because her daughter-in-law recently tested positive for the virus. Though they hadn’t seen each other for 12 days, the woman said she just wanted to be sure.
Barnett, who said she’s dealing with cancer, added that she was in favor of wearing face masks.
“It’s going to be here to stay,” she said. “We might as well just get used to it.”
Public health is also hosting free pop-up testing sites 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Trotwood Madison High School on Friday, July 17, and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds in Jefferson Twp. on Monday, July 20. Anyone with questions can call public health’s COVID-19 information line at 937-225-6217. Anyone can come to the free public health testings.
Besides testing for infections, Dohn said its important people take steps to prevent infections, such as wearing masks in public and keeping distance from each other.
“As the governor said yesterday, we’re at a point where this can either level off and get better or it’s going to rapidly get worse and you’re going to end up like some of these other states, which would be terrible for the economy and be terrible for people’s personal lives,” Dohn said. “And I think we all would like to get back to doing what we want to do and what we love to do, but that requires that we wear the masks and we take the practical options.”
Following pop-up testing in Xenia and Dayton in June, 62 people tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Nine people who were tested in Xenia received positive positive results and 948 tested negative, according to Five Rivers Health Centers. In Dayton, 53 people tested positive and 1,268 tested negative.
About the Author