Niagara Falls needs COVID-19 testing supplies. Their solution? The potential reallocation of Community Development Block Grant funds. But how did we get to this point? WBFO's Nick Lippa reports.
Niagara Falls officials are confident if they have the supplies, they can keep the virus in check. How do they know this?
Back in March, most health organizations only had enough testing supplies to test patients or health care workers that came in with symptoms of the virus. During this time, Memorial Medical Center’s CEO Joseph Ruffolo said they mapped every individual who tested positive in Niagara Falls. The data told them women and African-Americans were testing positive at higher rates.
"It was interesting that of all of the positive individuals that we tested, roughly 65% were female and 35% were male. Peel that back further with respect to looking at health disparity issues, roughly 32% of the individuals that tested positive were African American. And the population within the city of Niagara Falls of African Americans is somewhere around 23%. Peel the data back even further, of the females of the 65%, the female population that tested positive, roughly 63% of those females were between the ages of 18 and 59 years old. And within that segment of the positive activity of females, roughly 40% of those females are African American. So we clearly had the data that demonstrated not only were the clusters were, but the disparity issues that existed," Ruffolo said. “Simply put, once we had the testing available, we basically followed the map."
With that data they partnered with local leaders and put mobile testing in to effect. Ruffolo said the results speak for themselves.
“All together, we've probably tested over 7600 individuals since April... which is a pretty good clip. And we had a lot of momentum," he said. "The last 3,500 individuals that we tested in the community, and keep in mind this is like the most vulnerable population in hotspot areas, we tested less than a 1% positive rate.”
But in mid-July, their testing partner Kaleida Health notified Ruffolo they no longer had access to tests.
“This national supplier had been told by, we don't know who must be some federal agency, but basically told them that they needed to prioritize the redistribution of their supply chain to hotspot states-- mainly south, Southwest, and West,” he said.
In searching for new tests, Ruffolo said they’re competing globally.
“They were able to identify an outside commercial lab by the state that could supply tests," Ruffolo said "But the testing kits would be almost twice the cost of what we were previously paying for reagents todo community testing.”
That brings us full circle. The Niagara Falls City Council will be voting Friday night to authroize moving funds so they can test again.
“So pending the approval of the city council," Ruffolo said, "we will very quickly resume community testing in the most vulnerable neighborhoods that we had visited previously, to continue testing in those areas.”
The portion of the CDBG funding they would be using would be coming out of the CARES Act. Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino said they have to move quickly.
"The difficult thing that we face is that we see coming at us the reopening of schools, the need for us to make sure that our seniors are safe and untested nursing homes. All of those areas that would be left out if we didn't have the appropriate testing supplies in order to be able to address that. I am thankful that Memorial Medical Center took some time to survey the landscape and determine that there might be another option for them," he said.
