A flood of cars drove through the Santa Clara Fairgrounds all afternoon. Those inside the cars were looking to get PCR tests.
“I do it for others,” said Ginbar Ketema who came to be tested, “I don’t travel, I stay local but I intend to see my family and friends so I do it for them. “
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Thousands of others like Ketema have driven to the test site, she tells us that she is grateful for making her appointment when she did.
“(There are) quite a few places available for today,” Ketema said. “Tomorrow everything is complete.”
As counties scramble to meet demand for testing, two Bay Area companies say they’ve partnered up to give people another option.
“SummerBio has tested extensively for large organizations such as schools and universities,” Sasha Seletsky, Commercial Director of SummerBio.
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SummerBio, a company that the ABC7 Vaccine team first told you about earlier this year, says it has the capacity to process 30,000 more tests per day than it currently processes in its Menlo Park lab.
Kyla, another Bay Area company, is facilitating mobile COVID testing, as well as testing in clinics and homes.
The companies say the partnership can help people get their coronavirus test results in 24 hours or less.
“It’s just a very convenient way for people to go to the drive-thru or we can come to your place or you can come to a clinic, we just try to be as omnichannel as possible,” Garick Hismatullin said, founder of Kyla. and CEO.
“SummerBio is helping to make this all possible because if we were to run a lab and a scale and everything, obviously we wouldn’t be able to do a good job on the part that we want to be the best.”
At the county level, Santa Clara tells us that, weather permitting, they can adjust their hours to help meet demand and for residents here to check availability.
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Even with a new dominant variant and high demand for testing, Ginbar Ketema says vaccines and faster test results give her more hope than she had at the start of the pandemic.
“We’re not just against it,” she said. “We have some luck.”
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