Valley Medical opens drive-thru COVID-19 testing center in Milpitas

Santa Clara Valley Medical Center opened a drivethru COVID-19 testing center in Milpitas for its patients Wednesday.

The new testing center is at the Milpitas Sports Center, at 1325 E Calaveras Blvd., and it marks the second such site opened by Valley Medical Center in the county, after the one at Valley Health Center Downtown in San Jose.

The testing is by appointment only, and people seeking a test must go through their Valley Medical Center doctor to get a recommendation based on their individual health factors, according to Paul Lorenz, the medical system’s CEO.

“Anyone that currently receives care from a primary care provider or specialist within our health care system will be able to be scheduled to have a test if they meet the criteria,” he said.

To make an appointment with their doctor to get evaluated for a possible COVID-19 test, people should call Valley Connection, the county system’s health care call center, Lorenz said.

Valley Connection’s number is 1-888-334-1000, and it has options in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, among other languages.

People who do not have a health care provider also can contact Valley Connection, “and we can make sure that they get the appropriate health care that they need,” Lorenz said.

Lorenz said Valley Medical Center is now able to do COVID-19 testing in-house, which has increased its testing ability massively, as opposed to depending only on private labs and the county’s public health department testing ability.

“At this point in time, we’ve been able to move up our testing capacity up to around 1,600 a week, which is a significant increase over our previous capacity,” which was about 50 tests per day, Lorenz said.

Valley Medical Center hopes to open a testing center in the southern and northern parts of the county, as well as a location in East San Jose, as testing capacity expands.

While Valley Medical operates a clinic in Milpitas on Main Street, Lorenz said the testing site is being hosted at the sports center because the space would be “kind of tight” to run a drive-thru operation at the clinic.

“The partnership with the city of Milpitas has been very helpful, and we’re grateful for the city to be working with us on this project,” he said.

Across all its facilities, Valley Medical Center serves 250,000 to 300,000 people each year, according to Evelyn Ho, a spokeswoman for the county during the pandemic.

While the testing at the new Milpitas location and the existing San Jose location is limited to Valley Medical Center patients, “it will be obviously expanded in working with the public health department as more communitywide testing is made available,” Lorenz said, but he did not have a clear timeline for expanded testing.

Other free COVID-19 testing centers have opened to all Bay Area residents in recent weeks, including one in Fremont and one in Hayward that relocated to the campus of Cal State East Bay.

Those centers do not require a doctor’s recommendation, but people seeking to be tested need to show symptoms of COVID-19, usually including a fever of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit or more.