The healthcare startup Carbon Health is bringing its mobile COVID-19 testing site back to San Francisco this week, with two-day stops scheduled for Chinatown, the Mission District, and the Fillmore.
The mobile site will be located at Portsmouth Square in Chinatown on Tuesday and Wednesday before heading up to Sausalito for two days. It will be back in the Mission District on Saturday and Sunday at Valencia and 23rd streets before moving to the 1500 block of Fillmore Street on Monday and Tuesday next week.
Asymptomatic individuals are welcome for testing, and tests are available free of charge — although people with health insurance are asked to provide information about their coverage.
Testing is available by appointment only, which can be made online. No walk-up testing options are available.
“It’s not a barrier to get tested,” said Carrie Douglas, general manager for Carbon Health. “We can help them register [over the phone] if they don’t have an email address.”
Douglas said the mobile site had previously made stops in the Castro and the Mission District in May, and earlier this month had been located at the Stonestown Galleria.
The mobile testing site is operated out of a 40-foot trailer owned by Studio Dental, a San Francisco dental practice.
“Our trailer is a mobile dental office that we typically use to deliver dental services to people at work,” said Lowell Caulder, one of the owners of Studio Dental. “We typically bring it to offices and park it outside.”
Built in 2014, the trailer has two stations with dental chairs, x-ray machines, and everything else you would find in a typical dental office, Caulder said.
But the trailer had been sitting unused since March, when the stay-at-home order was issued.
“Since we weren’t using the trailer, we thought it would be a great opportunity for them to use it — for us to help the cause and utilize this asset we weren’t really using,” Caulder said.
Douglas said that Carbon Health had not yet determined where the mobile site will travel after this latest swing but that the schedule is typically announced about a week ahead of time.
“We’ll probably be back in San Francisco at least a few days the following week, and in Marin again, and some other East Bay locations,” she said.
A list of locations where you can be tested for COVID-19 can be found at sf.gov/GetTestedSF, or on the city’s interactive map.
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I tried to register online but it proved to be problematic. So I canceled.
When are these people going to just take people without all the techno bull***t?