In April, Gov. Gavin Newsom launched a multimillion-dollar state initiative to bring COVID-19 testing to the people and places with the least access: rural towns and disadvantaged inner-city neighborhoods.
California is now halting its expansion, citing costs, even as the state is getting walloped by record-setting spikes in new infections and double-digit increases in hospitalizations.
The state will no longer fund new testing sites, despite pleas from counties for additional assistance — and it has closed some locations and moved them elsewhere. It also has threatened to pull testing out of underutilized sites, according to nearly two dozen interviews with county public health officials.One of the (somewhat) rural places where testing will cease: Shingle Springs, population 4,432, in El Dorado County, population 181,058. Shingle Springs is basically exurban Sacramento.
According to the Times, Shingle Springs lost its testing site "because it couldn’t fill enough appointment slots."
A Newsom administration official confirmed that the state wants to see counties fill at least 80% of testing slots at each location. And if testing drops below 50% for a few days or longer, counties are warned, the sites could be transferred elsewhere.I wonder if the failure to fill testing slots is because of a certain "rural mentality" associated with places like Shingle Springs--or if perhaps the low rate of testing in western El Dorado County relates to the fact that most of the county's relatively few cases have been far away, in and around South Lake Tahoe. The county stretches many miles from the Sierra-Nevada foothills just east of Sacrament to Lake Tahoe.
Other arguably rural places that may lose testing sites if they don't get their numbers up are near Temecula in Riverside County and Mendocino County, where the state-funded site has provided "the only free testing available within a two-hour drive for some rural residents."
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