The move followed complaints the site was closing early due to heat.
(Courtesy Sean Chung)
A portable air-conditioning unit has been installed at a COVID-19 testing site south of Bloomington, officials said Monday.
“The AC was installed by Sunbelt,” said Christina Kempf, Monroe County public health coordinator. She said it had “been wonderful for the staff there who are in full PPE all day.”
OptumServe and its subsidiary Logistics Health Inc. run the site.
The state awarded OptumServe a nearly $18 million contract this spring. It aimed to open 50 testing sites around the state and provide 100,000 free tests per month. It has fallen short of those goals. It only has about 35 sites, and it took OptumServe four months to run the number of tests it had planned to run in a single month.
An Optum spokesperson said that the company was increasing capacity at all its sites.
“OptumServe continues to work closely with the state of Indiana to meet our commitments to increase testing capacity for Hoosiers,” Aaron Albright said. “A week after the state’s announcement, OptumServe opened 20 testing sites, and became fully operational two weeks later, increasing the state’s capacity by 100,000 tests a month. And remember, 11 of those 50 sites were later converted to support the state’s testing of long term care employees.”
Albright also confirmed the air-conditioning unit was installed in Bloomington.
Despite the delays and cancellations, Monroe County’s health administrator says the Bloomington site is exceeding expectations.
“They have been doing well over the number of anticipated tests per day. So even with closing at 2 or 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon instead of 8 (p.m.), they have still done well over the anticipated number of tests per day,” Penny Caudill said last week.
The air-conditioning installation is the latest attempt to bring the site up to speed and allow workers to stay later in the day without risking their safety.
“They had added some additional staff thinking that perhaps if they got more breaks that they might be able to withstand the heat,” Caudill said. “Because you can imagine you get all that PPE on and you've got high temperatures and high humidity, it gets pretty miserable.”
Bloomington’s site is scheduled to be open at least through August, but Caudill says the health department is working out the details for a site that would operate through the winter.
Many of the state’s testing sites are either outdoors or in places without air conditioning, such as National Guard armories. This includes the Bloomington location.
