Mayor Lenny Curry announced Monday that Jacksonville would be getting a drive up coronavirus testing site by the end of the week.
“We learned yesterday from federal partners working with the Florida Department of Health that Jacksonville will be a site for drive-up testing,” Mayor Curry said at a City Council meeting on COVID-19 on Monday morning.
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The testing site is expected to be at or near TIAA Bank Field. Details will be released as soon as possible, he said.
As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Sunday, the drive-through testing sites will be limited to testing those meeting specific criteria, such as the elderly who are experiencing coronavirus symptoms and those with known contact to another confirmed case.
Curry said the city is also working with area hospitals to improve their testing capacity.
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As of Monday evening, Duval County has four confirmed COVID-19 cases, according to the state health department, including City Councilman Sam Newby. But Curry said he expects that number to rise once testing becomes more widely available.
“The smaller number of reported cases are a false sense of security. These folks were infected before we knew this disease was in our community. The positive cases we will see in the days ahead are a result of transmissions that are weeks old,” he said. “We must stop this now as a community, and we do that through social distancing.”
Brendan Rivers can be reached at brivers@wjct.org, 904-358-6396 or on Twitter at @BrendanRivers.
