Drive-through COVID-19 test site wildly busy on first day, SHA staying the course for now

It seems the new drive-through COVID-19 testing centre was the hot ticket in Regina on Tuesday afternoon.

The Saskatchewan Health Authority said Wednesday it opened up all six lanes of the testing centre on the first day and performed 260 swabs without turning anyone away.

But the popularity also caused some problems: Vehicles were backed up from the testing centre doors through the parking lot, down Pasqua Street, onto Dewdney Avenue and, at some points, out onto Lewvan Drive.

Alan Andrews said he was waiting in line for about an hour and a half before getting near the front.

“It was moving slow but then back there it started picking up a bit. I sat back there for a long time, (but) now it’s every five minutes you’re moving forward,” Andrews said while waiting.

He said he didn’t think he had the virus, but he’d started getting cold symptoms so he wanted to get tested.

Carla Balch said she had been waiting for an hour, but seeing as the line went out to Lewvan, she said it wasn’t that bad.

“First of all, (I) went to the wrong spot. (I) went in the other side and then saw the sign and came back,” said Balch.

Balch said she was a little surprised at the size of the line.

Vehicles line up to get into the drive-through testing site at Evraz Place on Sept. 8, 2020. (Britton Gray/980 CJME)

“But (on the) first day of school, people want to double-check,” said Balch.

Leanne Yano also was in the line for a while, but she was willing to cut the SHA some slack about the length of the wait.

“It’s the first day,” she said. “I didn’t realize it would be this popular. I’m sure that they’ll make adjustments if they need to.”

Tim Reid is the CEO of Regina Exhibition Association Limited, which operates Evraz Place. It’s the site of both the health authority’s Regina field hospital and now the drive-through testing facility.

Reid said the organization has been working closely with the SHA on the projects and was surprised at the uptake in the testing on Tuesday.

“I think it means that people are aware the location is here, they’re comfortable coming to this location and ultimately it’s a convenient location for people who are looking for COVID testing to occur … It was just more capacity than we thought we were going to see,” he said.

On Wednesday the two groups worked together and Reid said they were coming up with a number of plans.

Reid said one of the big goals right now is to keep the SHA operations on the campus separate from the regular operations in the Co-operators Centre and AffinityPlex, especially as they become more busy this fall.

He said they’re managing to keep them separate, but that created some of the challenges seen with the testing site lineups on Tuesday.

Reid believes they’ve figured out some strong workarounds. He said the nice thing about having such large grounds is that there’s a lot of flexibility.

“We’re going to monitor, with the SHA, how many people show and obviously we want to keep the COVID testing site segregated from the regular operations of our building and we seem to be doing that reasonably well,” said Reid.

Reid also said they’re going to continue with the existing plan for the time being. If it gets extremely busy again when the site opens on Thursday, Reid said they can reroute cars through other places on campus.

The SHA didn’t provide anyone to answer questions but did send out a statement to media from Sara Johnson, the director of primary health care in Regina.

In the statement, she said the authority was pleased with the uptake in testing at the site. She also said the site won’t be changing things like its hours until SHA officials know whether the current high demand will continue.

Johnson also reminded people to look at the map on the government’s website to get to the testing facility line.

— With files from 980 CJME’s Britton Gray