In urban areas, churches serve as sites for COVID testing

BRIDGEPORT — State Sen. Marilyn Moore didn’t want to say she told Gov. Ned Lamont so, but, well, seeing testing for COVID-19 going on in the parking lot of Mount Aery Baptist Church on Frank Street was gratifying, if it’s only a start.

“Ned’s talking to me like, ‘Oh, we talked about this,’ ” said Moore, chair of the Senate Human Services Committee. “I said, ‘Yeah, Ned. It was in April.’ It was April I started saying, ‘You’ve got to get into the communities.’ ”

Moore, Lamont, Mayor Joseph Ganim and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal were among the dignitaries on hand Friday afternoon to recognize Mount Aery, which is running testing twice a week through Optimus Health, and a pilot program by nonprofit 4-CT that will provide churches $500 grants to support testing with help from the Community Health Center Association of Connecticut.

“We’ll see where that goes,” said Ted Yang, 4-CT’s co-founder and CEO. “End of the day, we want to do what’s necessary, and testing goes hand in hand with several of our initiatives.”

People can be tested without cost, Lamont stressed.

“If you’re found to be positive, we’ll find a place for you to stay,” Lamont said. “Testing is not just about making sure you’re safe, but making sure your community is safe and your family is safe.”

There are 21 churches around the state taking part, including six in Bridgeport.

It’s an important step, Moore said, because it’ll build a relationship in the community that will help when contact tracing ramps up behind testing.

“You can’t get to the people who need the information in urban centers without going through the churches,” Moore said. “My problem is you come to them after you’ve done everything else, when this is really the heart of our community. “We’ve got more churches in Bridgeport than we’ve got grocery stores, many, many more than even bodegas,” she added. “This is the place you need to come.”

Mount Aery has had a relationship with Optimus for the past 14 years, the Rev. Anthony L. Bennett said. Hundreds of thousands of people have been helped by the Hollow Community Health Center, just on the other side of the church.

Bennett said he was gratified to see recognition for the work being done on the ground as it has been a challenging few months for his church.

“These are human beings,” Bennett said. “Some are healthy; some have underlying conditions — Challenging, to say the least.”

Black and Hispanic communities, Blumenthal noted, have been hit disproportionately by the pandemic, in terms of both cases and deaths. Moore pointed out that Bridgeport communities that are densely populated, with many multifamily homes, had a heavy caseload.

Moore said she’d love to see a testing van parked outside an apartment building for the day and have the whole building get tested. But she also wants to make sure that testing doesn’t become a financial burden for these churches, which were shut down for stretches because of the pandemic.

Though COVID-related hospitalizations in Connecticut were up Friday for the first time in a month, going from 122 to 127, the daily positive-test rate was under 1 percent, 65 out of nearly 8,000 tests.

“We’ve seen what happened in other parts of the country,” Ganim said. “We want to keep our cases low. We want to keep people alive and healthy.”

Ned Gerard / Hearst Connecticut Media Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim sits for a COVID-19 test during a visit to the mobile testing site set up outside Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport on Friday. Ganim is seen here with Optimus Health Care medical assistants Dolimar Rivera, center, and Cassandra Rodriguez, left.

Ned Gerard / Hearst Connecticut Media U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal speaks during a news conference next to the mobile COVIE-19 testing site set up outside Mount Aery Church, in Bridgeport on Friday.