Temporary community COVID-19 testing site opens at Pueblo Mall
PUEBLO, Colo. (KRDO) -- A new and free testing site for COVID-19 has opened in Pueblo in response to the very high demand for testing in the community.
The testing site is located on the south side of Pueblo Mall near where the Sears auto service building is. Randy Evetts, the director for Pueblo County Public Health, said during a virtual press conference Monday the site is meant to help decrease the long lines people have experienced at the State Fairgrounds testing site.
"We started to hear and see we were having several hours of wait time for people to get into the site and recognized the need to expand our testing given the big growth in the virus in our community and other people who wanted to be tested it was important to get this site opened up,” Evetts says.
Both locations will be open Monday through Saturday from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. “It’s easy to do," Evetts says. "It takes about ten minutes once you're inside of the testing facility and you will get your results back in a couple of days.”
However, this is only a temporary site and it will close by the end of December, meaning those long lines at the State Fairgrounds could happen once again. Evetts believes with the way Pueblo County is trending, they will need this new testing site for longer than a month.
Evetts says, “I suspect that our numbers will not go down before the new year just given the time of the holiday season and the high numbers that we are at.” Hoping the state will step in to keep the site open. “If the state is able to identify additional funding we will continue this in the new year.”
Deaths in Pueblo County continue to outpace El Paso County deaths, in relation to population size, the Pueblo County Health Department is still trying to figure out why this is happening.
“It could be because of age, it could be because of other underlining factors that we haven’t identified yet so it’s something we are aware of but we don’t have a certain answer to it,” Evetts says.
