COVID-19 testing sites for school staff closed

San Diego County has shut down four COVID-19 testing sites that were dedicated to school staff, because testing resources are needed more elsewhere, officials said.

The county has “paused” the testing sites “until area school districts get closer to reopening for wider in-person instruction,” the San Diego County Office of Education said Sunday.

School employees can still be tested for free at the county’s general testing sites.

While schools started reopening in San Diego County in late August, over the past few weeks many school districts have been temporarily closing schools amid the current COVID-19 surge, often due to staffing shortages caused by COVID-19.

The majority of students in the county, including public and private schools, are learning at home.

In September the county announced that it had opened four testing sites in San Diego, El Cajon, Del Mar and Chula Vista, to offer free coronavirus testing to the more than 80,000 school employees who work in the county.

The school staff testing sites were generally doing fewer than 200 tests a day. County testing sites for the general public, by comparison, are doing between 800 and 1,200 tests per day, said Bob Mueller, coordinator of special projects for the county education office, in a Zoom briefing Tuesday morning.

“We did not have the numbers that we had anticipated for those teachers and faculty and staff to get tested, so we basically pulled those resources and put them in other areas where we desperately needed them,” said county Chief Resilience Officer Gary Johnston during the briefing.

Some educators have said that teachers had been turned away from the school staff testing sites and were told the sites did not have enough tests available for them. Others said they think the use of the school staff testing sites has been low recently because of the winter break.

Johnston said he’s not sure if the county will be able to reopen the school staff testing sites because the county already is strained while administering f lu and COVID-19 vaccines.