After operating for 2-and-a-half years, the last drive-through COVID-19 test site in western Massachusetts has closed for good.
When American Medical Response signed up in the summer of 2020 to run a COVID-19 testing site in the parking lot of the Eastfield Mall in Springfield under the state’s “Stop the Spread” program, Patrick Leonardo, a regional director with AMR, said he had no idea what to expect.
He ordered 1,000 test kits from a lab in Boston figuring that would be plenty for the 11 days the site was expected to operate. That initial order was used up in two days.
Then the state decided to keep the free testing site open for another 30 days, then 30 more days, then three months, followed by more extensions until last Friday when “Stop the Spread” ended.
“We definitely did not think this was going to be a long-term event here,” Leonardo said Friday in an interview at the Eastfield Mall.
By the time the program ended, more than 455,000 tests had been administered at the Springfield site, said Leonardo.
“It was a great relief to see the community effort to make sure that we were safe, the community was safe, and that everybody was able to get tested as fast as we could and get results back as fast as we did, which normally was 24 hours, which was unheard of with a PCR test,” Leonardo said.
The highest number of tests on a single day was 3,279 on January 3, 2022 – during the peak of a huge surge in COVID-19 cases as a result of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
“To think we started with an eight-foot table and ten-by-ten tent and to see a bird’s-eye view of our busiest day with six parking lots (of cars) five lanes wide,” Leonardo recalled.
As vaccination rates rose, and new infections declined rapidly, the demand for COVID-19 testing waned. Stop the Spread drive-through testing sites in Holyoke and Greenfield closed in March 2022.
During the two-and-a-half years the COVID-19 testing site in Springfield operated, more than 130 AMR staffers worked there, said Leonardo.
“It was an all-team effort to come in and get this done,” Leonardo said. “Whether it was 100 degrees out or 10 degrees out, they got it done and we are extremely proud of those people and their dedication. It was amazing to see.”
On the final day of COVID-19 testing at the Eastfield Mall, AMR’s frontline staffers were thanked at a lunch hosted by State Rep. Orlando Ramos of Springfield.
“They stepped up and its because of them we were able to make it through this pandemic the way that we did,” Ramos said.
Both AMR and the Eastfield Mall were given proclamations from the Massachusetts House and Senate and the Springfield City Council.
