What started out as a 6-month project, ended up lasting for over two years!
On February 28th, 2023 our vulnerable community mobile COVID-19 testing program concluded. THANK YOU to the communities of St. Raymond of Penafort Church and Richard Allen Preparatory Charter School for inviting us into your communities. Also, thank you to the staff and other partners in care who worked out of tents and cared for hundreds of people a day during the early days of the pandemic. We never could have imagined that the testing emergency would have ended up lasting for years and we couldn’t have done it without our partners such as the Philadelphia Eagles, Comcast, and the City of Philadelphia.
Testing By The Numbers
The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected minority groups, particularly African Americans. Widespread access to testing is essential in order to rapidly detect, isolate and prevent spread. Jefferson Health (Jefferson) has partnered with the City of Philadelphia Department of Public Health to establish two COVID testing sites in Philadelphia with a focus on reaching vulnerable populations. The Jefferson COVID-19 Mobile Unit was awarded funding to increase access to COVID-19 testing for patients and community members living in underserved and at-risk areas. Jefferson partnered with two facilities in areas that needed additional testing, one at St. Raymond’s Church in Northwest Philadelphia, and one at Richard Allen Preparatory Charter School in Southwest Philadelphia. These two testing sites have been operational since May 2020 and have seen over 30,000 patients. The goal of these testing sites is to increase access to testing for vulnerable populations.
Demographic data is collected for each patient. Current data is taken from a group of 34,648 individuals. As it stands out of data collected so far, of these 34,648 patients served, 26,636 are aged from 18-64 years, 4,466 are from 0-17 years, and 3,546 are over 65 years old. This makes our most predominant age range 18-64 years, being just under 77% of the total population tested. Out of all patients, 61.3% identify as female and 38.6% identify as male, with only 0.1% opting to not disclose their gender. Race was broken down into more populations: 55% identifying as Black or African American, 22.8% identifying as White or Caucasian, 3.2% identifying as Hispanic, 2.9% identifying as Asian, and a combined 16.1% identifying as another race or not disclosing their race.
This shows that our work in vulnerable populations is necessary, with a combined 77% of patients coming from predominantly underserved communities and backgrounds. Along with demographic data, testing data was collected when tests were administered. Out of recorded data, Point-of-Care tests that were completed on site totaled 7,568 tests. Of these 7,568 tests, 7,163 had negative results and only 405 had positive results, totaling 5.35%. These results were almost mirrored in Lab tests. Out of 12,697 recorded lab tests sent out for processing and review, 10,803 came back negative and 1,894, or 14.9%, came back positive.
