This month, King County and local community organizations partnered with Ms. Tina Knowles Lawson’s #IDIDMYPART campaign and Beyoncé’s BeyGood initiative to provide two back-to-back free drive-thru COVID-19 testing sites in South King County. The strong results—long lines around the block in both locations, and the testing of more than 1,200 people—demonstrate the high demand for testing in underserved areas, and will be used to inform the equitable planning of future test sites.
The sites provided the greatest number of COVID-19 tests of any mobile testing site in Washington state so far.
“I’m proud to have developed this partnership for King County and grateful to Ms. Tina Knowles Lawson and BeyGood for their commitment and partnership with us,” said Hamdi Mohamed, King County Policy Advisor for the Executive Office of Equity and Social Justice. “The results speak for themselves. We look forward to working with others to create future testing opportunities that are accessible to Black and brown communities throughout our Puget Sound region.”
The Renton and Federal Way testing sites delivered:
- 1,205 COVID-19 tests and face masks
- Approximately 3,500 essential cleaning supply kits
- On-site interpretation in over 25 languages
- Sample data collected in Renton shows that of 577 people tested, 80 percent were people of color. 15 percent were Black or African-American.
“A huge thanks to Health Point, Sea Mar, Harborview Medical Center, Medical Teams Initiative, Somali Health Board, Visionary Pathways, Public Health Reserve Corps, King County Public Health, DCHS, Office of Emergency Management, Sheng-Yen Lu Foundation, Matthew 25 Industries, and Procter & Gamble for their logistical support and help with this event,” said Mohamed. “This was an incredible team effort: we also could not have pulled this off without the leadership of Ms. Tina Knowles and Beygood and the efforts of our more than 200 volunteers.”
Key to the success of these sites and future efforts to stop the spread of the virus are: 1) Doing more to make families aware of testing sites, 2) partnering with trusted local organizations, 3) ensuring the availability of language support, and 4) working toward a culturally competent contact tracing infrastructure.
The above is a press release from King County. The Auburn Examiner has not independently verified its contents and encourages our readers to personally verify any information they find may be overly biased or questionable. The publication of this press release does not indicate an endorsement of its contents.