Where can you get a COVID-19 test in the Kansas City area? What you need to know
When the Kansas City Health Department announced it would test 500 people for COVID-19, the slots filled up in a matter of hours.
Some people drove up to the mobile sites last week with telltale symptoms — fevers, body aches. Many with no symptoms just wanted to know if they had the virus.
Some people were hot for another reason — pent-up frustration over the struggle to get tested.
“People are anxious,” said the department’s deputy director, Frank Thompson. “People are frustrated. People are angry that they’re not able to get a test right now.”
But the testing landscape in Kansas City is evolving. Drive-thru sites are popping up all around the metro, as community testing — beyond the walls of your doctor’s office, hospital and urgent care — ramps up.
Area public health officials worry that this month’s softening of stay-at-home orders could lead to a spike in cases without more widespread testing.
They’re expanding their efforts, as staffing and funding allow. Health departments are setting up shop in parking lots, offering more free testing, mostly for people with symptoms but sometimes for those without. In some cases, private enterprise has lent a hand, providing testing kits and protective equipment.
Before last week, Kansas City’s health department had only tested its own employees.
“I think we really understood that you’ve got to bring the tests to the community, whether it’s drive-thru, whether it’s walk-thru, the community has to feel like tests are available to them,” White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Deborah Birx said last week after CVS Health, Walgreens, Walmart and other national chains announced plans to expand free testing in their stores.
“So just having it at hospitals or clinics was not going to be enough.”
Testing more of the general public will help show how badly the disease has infected Kansas City, said Thompson, whose public health duties now include traffic control.
Overseeing a site last week in front of Kipp Endeavor Academy, Thompson set up traffic cones to keep cars moving in the same direction through the charter school’s parking lot facing 18th Street. He wore a medical mask, like the other workers.
What’s known so far, Thompson said, is based “on very limited data, somewhat self-selected data because it’s only those people who have symptoms that are able to get tested.”
Get tested at Walmart
Most of the testing sites around Kansas City are run by health care providers and health departments. Dr. Sharon Lee’s Family Health Care on Southwest Boulevard in Kansas City, Kansas, was one of the first to offer drive-thru testing in March.
The tests are typically free. Some places will bill your insurance if you have it.
This is what usually happens: While you sit in your car a health care worker wrapped in protective gear will slip a long swab far up into your nose to take a sample. It’s uncomfortable but lasts seconds. If you have symptoms, you might be told to stay away from other people until you get your results back.
The sites operate for limited hours in the parking lots of hospitals, churches, schools. There’s one in a Walmart parking lot in Gladstone, too.
Most of the drive-thru locations require an appointment and some type of screening, sometimes through an online questionnaire.
Platte County residents are asked to use an online “symptom self-reporting tool” if they want an appointment at the county’s drive-thru site. In the “near future” the county’s health department “may wish to test people experiencing symptoms as well as people who are asymptomatic,” its website says.
Sometimes, people are asked to make a phone call.
Truman Medical Centers ask people who want to be tested at their multiple mobile sites around town to call 816-404-2273 and speak to a nurse. You don’t need to be a hospital patient, but do need to have at least one symptom to get tested.
This week’s lineup includes testing at Metro Christian Fellowship Church in Grandview on Monday, Sheffield Family Life Center on Winner Road on Tuesday and Ruskin High School on Friday.
In Johnson County, you need an invitation to participate in the “community sampling.” Health officials there “secured” enough supplies to offer their first drive-thru testing in early April — by invitation only to “ensure broad demographic and geographic sampling,” the department said.
‘Due to a limited number of test kits’
The Clay County Public Health Center began testing the general public during the third week in April at a drive-thru testing site in the parking lot of Pleasant Valley Baptist Church in Liberty.
Before that, the health center’s involvement in testing was limited to helping health care providers in the county get their test samples processed through a state-run lab, said Ashley Wegner, the center’s section chief of health planning and policy. “We knew testing had to be expanded,” she said.
The health center didn’t have the tests or lab needed to offer its own testing. Shortages have plagued the coronavirus pandemic from its earliest days. In Kansas, recently tagged as one of the worst states in terms of per capita testing, Gov. Laura Kelly has called it “the biggest frustration that I have.”
“I think from a public health perspective, we would like to see a lot more testing,” said Thompson. “What we saw (at the testing sites) …and just the online responses is an indication that there’s a lot of public interest in getting tested. The response to these three days of testing has been overwhelming.
“And if we’re truly going to be able to open back up and return people to work, we’ve got to know how much the disease is out here in our community and where it is so that we can work to stop the spread of what’s out there. But the testing to date has not been sufficient for us to really accurately identify that.”
Clay County’s problems were remedied somewhat thanks to the CEOs from a handful of local companies, including Russell Stover Chocolates Inc. and NorthPoint Development, who formed a collaborative called the C19KC Task Force.
The group is providing personal protective equipment and test kits to area health care providers and health departments. The tests are being run in labs at the University of Kansas Health System, a partner in the effort.
Clay County began its community campaign by testing 25 people a day. Last week it expanded to 50 each day.
‘”Originally, we were thinking at a minimum we had to prioritize testing for people exhibiting respiratory symptoms,” said Wegner. “But we’ve been able to broaden that and offer some testing to people who don’t have symptoms so we can start getting a feel for the number of mild illnesses in the community.”
Residents who go online to sign up are warned, though, that “due to a limited number of test kits,” some who fill out the screening questionnaire might not get tested.
Residents are directed to a handful of urgent cares in the county that will test symptomatic people who have insurance, local hospitals that test only their own patients, and the Walmart in Gladstone.
The Walmart site opened April 24, part of a national campaign sponsored by the giant retail chain and a company called eTrueNorth. They are providing COVID-19 tests to anyone showing symptoms, and all health care providers and first responders whether they have symptoms or not.
At Walmart, the tests are self-administered.
People swab their own noses.
Who can get tested?
People who have symptoms, hospital patients, health care workers and emergency responders remain high on the testing priority list. Saint Luke’s Health System, for instance, set up drive-thru testing for local first responders at four of its locations.
Essential workers get tested, too, and in some places that now includes grocery store employees.
Johnson County health officials are sending testing swabs to 40 long-term care facilities chosen at random.
“Johnson County’s testing plan is based on monitoring activities of the virus in every segment of our population — residents in long-term care facilities, first responders, essential workers and the general population,” Samni Areola, Johnson County’s public health director, said in a statement to The Star. “We have conducted tests in these populations many times.”
In Wyandotte County and the city of Kansas City, testing efforts are directed toward those known to be at high risk for suffering the worst consequences of this new coronavirus — African American and Hispanic residents.
On April 23 the Kansas City City Council ponied up $800,000 to expand work in testing and tracing coronavirus cases in Kansas City, as well as enforcing social distancing requirements and providing personal protective equipment for the health department and safety-net providers.
The city has identified 15 city ZIP codes that have been disproportionately slammed by the virus or have much poverty. The health department has found that African American residents account for about half of the city’s COVID-19 cases, but are only about 30 percent of the population.
That will be uppermost in Thompson’s mind as the department chooses more testing sites.
“If we’re testing at a location and we’re not finding a lot of positives, we’ll move to a new location. If we’re testing at a location and we’re getting at least 5% positives, we will stay at that location and continue to test,” he said. “The idea is to try and find where the hot spots are in the city and get people tested there.”
Health officials in Wyandotte County set up a community testing site in their own Ann Avenue parking in early April. At first, it was open three days a week. Now it’s open every weekday. And what was originally set up as a drive-thru can now accommodate walk-up traffic, too, a switch other sites have made for people who don’t have cars.
County residents don’t need an appointment. They’re asked to consider getting tested if, over the last 48 hours, they’ve experienced one of several symptoms now associated with the virus, including diarrhea and loss of smell and taste.
Erin Corriveau could tell by the response that testing taking place in doctor’s offices, hospitals and urgent cares wasn’t enough to meet the public’s need. She is the deputy medical officer for the Unified Government’s Public Health Department.
“It wasn’t instantaneous that we had a huge load of people coming in on a daily basis. It has taken us a couple of weeks … to earn the trust of the community … that truly these tests are being provided for them free of charge and with no questions asked,” said Corriveau.
“I think word of mouth is a very powerful means of information spread in our community. And so I think that it’s just taken a little bit of time. But I have to tell you it’s really bustling now. And some days we’re doing over 100 tests here in an afternoon.”
Before they started community testing, Wyandotte County health officials created a task force that included church leaders from local Hispanic and African American communities to advise them on how best to reach out. COVID-19 information on the health department’s website is offered in English and Spanish.
The county teamed up with Vibrant Health and Swope Health to conduct its pop-up testing. The community clinics have helped the government entity overcome a hurdle of gaining people’s trust, Corriveau said.
Pop-up sites in the future will be key in the county’s overall testing efforts. The goal, she said, is to offer about three a week, while the department continues to test in its own parking lot.
Priority goes to people with symptoms — a fever higher than 100, shortness of breath and a dry cough.
“I think the real question is when do we start asymptomatic testing,” said Corriveau. “We’ve thought a lot about this. It would be wonderful if we had enough tests to do sort of a representative sample of our community here. My goal would be to get 10 percent of Wyandotte County tested. We don’t currently have the resources for that.”
In Johnson County, Areola said his department “has tested some people without symptoms as part of testing in the general population and in essential workers. However, moving forward additional testing depends on the availability of testing supplies. There is no set date for when we will have more supplies.”
Last week Los Angeles County made news by making free testing available to all residents, whether or not they have symptoms. But that’s not the case in Kansas City. Yet.
“It’s going to be about finding those asymptomatic folks, because right now there are folks out here in the community with COVID who are asymptomatic,” said Thompson with the Kansas City Health Department.
“And we need to be able to inform them so they can take appropriate steps to protect their family, friends, co-workers. That’s the thing that’s critical about being able to do the no-symptom tests.”
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