Hamilton County will close Alstom site for COVID-19 testing, use property for vaccines

Staff Photo by Robin Rudd / The former Alstom manufacturing site off West 19th Street was photographed on April 11, 2020.
Staff Photo by Robin Rudd / The former Alstom manufacturing site off West 19th Street was photographed on April 11, 2020.

The Hamilton County Health Department will convert the Alstom site on Riverfront Parkway to a COVID-19 vaccination site after the location hosted coronavirus testing for more than eight months.

The county will close the site for testing after March 13. Becky Barnes, administrator for the health department, said the agency will turn its focus to vaccinations.

"Stopping testing will let us use all of our staffing resources [for] vaccination efforts," Barnes said during a Thursday afternoon livestream. "But we still want to emphasize that we need everyone to be tested that has symptoms or has had a high-risk exposure."

Coronavirus testing will remain available at Alleo Health, LifeSpring Community Health and Clinica Medicos.

The health department did not provide a timeline for when the site will open for vaccinations. Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger announced the Alstom site change during the county commission meeting Wednesday and said the county is looking to partner with BlueCross BlueShield to provide vaccinations at the site.

The health department is administering COVID-19 vaccines at Enterprise South Nature Park, the Tennessee Riverpark and the CARTA Bus Barn. Over two days this week, the county operated all three sites at once with its community partners and administered 5,447 total doses, Barnes said.

The health department opened the Alstom site for COVID-19 testing in August, after moving locations several times. The Alstom location, which was considered as an overflow location if hospital systems became overwhelmed, served as the main testing location in the county during the worst months of the pandemic last winter.

New coronavirus cases have dropped since early February to a fraction of the winter surge. On Thursday, the county was averaging 66 new cases a day in the past week and reported 52 confirmed hospitalizations. With the drop in cases, fewer people are being tested for the virus in the county. The county is averaging 718 new tests a day in the past week on Thursday.

The past two weeks have been among the lowest testing totals reported since the data was released in July. The recent drop in testing demand triggered reduced hours and day changes to the Alstom site schedule.

During the Thursday livestream, Coppinger praised the efforts of the health department to provide doses to area residents.

"What's really important to us is that any and everybody in our community eventually has the opportunity to get the vaccination," he said. "We know that we're getting really close to being able to get some type of normalcy back, so that's why these vaccinations are so important."

The county added 16,255 vaccinations in the past week, according to data released Wednesday by the Hamilton County Health Department. The county is averaging 1,465 first-dose shots and 906 second-dose shots a day in the past week.

According to the Tennessee Department of Health, 9.12% of Hamilton County's population has received both doses of the available two-dose vaccine or the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Tennessee and Georgia are among the lowest states in the nation for the percentage of population having received at least one shot of the vaccine, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The two states have a similar ranking for the percentage of the population that has been fully vaccinated.

Despite a record number of vaccines administered in the past week, Hamilton County continues to struggle to vaccinate Black residents to levels reflective of the county's demographics. Black residents make up around 19% of the county's population but so far have received 11% of the administered doses.

"We need to do a better job with our African American and Hispanic, Latinx communities and getting people to be able to participate," Coppinger said during the Wednesday commission meeting.

Contact Wyatt Massey at wmassey@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6249. Follow him on Twitter @news4mass.

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