EDINBURG — Once again, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s School of Medicine opened a drive-thru COVID-19 testing site, testing about 200 individuals for the virus Monday.
The site looked like the other university-run sites that have periodically popped up across the Rio Grande Valley during COVID-19 waves over the better part of two years: a big white tent, orange traffic cones and staff clad in facemasks that can even make a temperate day like Tuesday feel a little too warm and sticky.
Those white tents have sprung up like mushrooms after a heavy rain every time the Valley has seen a significant pandemic surge.
Dr. Linda Nelson, senior director of clinical operations, was there under the tent Tuesday with a team of COVID test administrators who’ve become old hands over the course of the pandemic.
The site tested about 200 people Tuesday, Nelson said, for the most part ill individuals with relatively mild symptoms — things like congestion, sore throats and headaches.
That’s a comfort to Nelson and her staff. She remembers one of her early patients in March 2020 had to watch her father’s funeral via Zoom, a particular tragedy that stays in her mind. Some of the people the university tested then were sick enough to be hospitalized, a couple of them urgently, via ambulance.
Nelson remembers family members calling women in the university testing line then to tell them that their father had died.
That was not the case Tuesday, Nelson said, and it was audible. There were significantly fewer coughs.
“We don’t have that level of acuity as far as illness, and I think that makes us feel a little bit better,” she said.
Nelson, a Tennessee transplant who speaks with a reassuringly folksy twang, put it simply: “They just feel rotten.”
Relatively benign symptoms were evident in the people who came to be tested, Nelson said. They weren’t deathly ill, like some of the people in those lines were last year, and their attitudes reflected that.
Often, she said, they were mostly preoccupied with how long they would have to take off from work if they tested positive — an isolation period Nelson said is very necessary, but an inconvenience she’s sympathetic to.
“It’s hard, when you’ve gotta pay your bills, feed your family,” she said. “But on the other hand, we’ve got to protect everybody as well.”
Those lighter symptoms were comforting to Nelson and her crew, but she says the amount of people who have tested positive locally and how fast infection rates are increasing is concerning.
“I think when we came back to the tent today it was like deja vu: here we go again,” she said. “Can this really be happening again?”
It was a hard feeling for Nelson to put an adjective to. She said her staff isn’t frustrated. They’re not in a state of disbelief, either, or overwhelmed by sorrow. Nor have these ad hoc testing sites become routine. Testing staff is, Nelson noted, still working outside, on the blacktop, under a tent next to a generator — conditions that likely won’t ever seem routine.
“I think that we’re accepting,” she said.
COVID-19 and the testing it necessitates are facts, Nelson says, and she and her team are glad to be a part of the response.
“I think the Valley’s been very supportive and good to the med-school, and I want to thank the Valley for that,” she said. “And for just being the Valley, the Valley’s so great. It’s nice to know that we’re making a difference.”
For the next couple of weeks, Nelson sees the testing facility being right where it is. In a month or so, it may be gone, and if conditions worsen, the university can ramp up testing significantly. It’s no longer, she says, “stretched to the limit” like it was previously in the pandemic.
The university and its lab can turn around results in a day, and Nelson says that ability should mitigate strain on testing needs in the Valley.
As for Nelson’s advice on the new wave of infections? It’s advice she’s gotten weary of given and many have gotten weary of hearing: wash your hands, wear your mask and social distance.
Also, Nelson said, get vaccinated.
“I respect everyone’s opinion on it,” she said, “on the other hand I thought across the nation more people would get vaccinated, just because the number of deaths that we had.”
Drive-thru tests will be available by appointment, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, at the UTRGV CESS Building, 1407 E. Freddy Gonzalez Drive and Expressway frontage.
To make an appointment, call the UT Health RGV COVID-19 line at (833) 888-2268, or register on the patient portal at uthealthrgv.org/health-care-news/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/.
More information on testing and the university’s response is available at https://uthealthrgv.org/health-care-news/coronavirus/.
