Saturday, August 8, 2020 || By Michael Romain || @maywoodnews
Residents who passed by Rock of Ages Baptist Church in Maywood, 1309 Madison St. in Maywood, last Wednesday afternoon, or Casa Esperanza Community Center, 1101 23rd Ave. in Melrose Park, last Friday afternoon, may have noticed lines of people and cars queued outside.
Last week, those two facilities hosted free COVID-19 tests for those who needed them, along with a range of pediatric, legal and social support services.
The testing will take place over the next two weeks at the churches. And residents don’t need an appointment or insurance to take advantage of the service.
Testing at Rock of Ages will take place on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., and Wednesday, Aug. 19, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Testing at Casa Esperanza will take place on Friday, Aug. 14, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., and Friday, Aug. 21, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
During a Zoom press conference held Aug. 4, members of the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership (CSPL), the COVID Equity Response Collaborative: Loyola (CERCL), Rock of Ages and Casa Esperanza gave updates on last week’s testing push and explained their overall mission to help slow the spread of COVID-19 in the Proviso Township area.
“In order to work towards health equity during the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve adopted the Test, Trace, Support strategy,” said Sumbul Siddiqui, a medical student at Loyola Stritch School of Medicine who interns for CSPL and helped organize CERCL.
Siddiqui said that the strategy’s three main goals are to “increase the accessibility of community testing through partnerships with community organizations,” to “offer support to individuals who are isolating or quarantined due to infection or exposure,” and to “train community members to become contact tracers, educate community about critical goal of contact tracing and containing the virus.”
Siddiqui said that the free COVID-19 testing operations in Maywood and Melrose Park took about three or four months to implement.
A free COVID-19 testing operating setup in the parking lot of Rock of Ages Baptist Church in Maywood last Wednesday. | Provided photo
Thao Griffith, an assistant professor at Loyola’s Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing and one of the faculty co-organizers for CERCLE, said that on Wednesday and Friday last week, the partner organizations provided free drive-thru and walk-up testing, in addition to a range of resources, to 100 community members Maywood and Melrose Park.
“At the moment, our testing capacity is limited to 50 tests per day,” she said, adding that due to the limited capacity, the free testing should be reserved for those who are symptomatic or who may have been exposed to the virus to get tested at the two sites.
“We understand that it’s important to test everyone whether you have symptoms or not, with or without exposures,” Griffith said. “Therefore, we are working diligently to establish additional partnerships with healthcare organizations in the community, as well as to seek and obtain additional funding. We are hopeful to increase our testing capacity and support the sustainability of this important service.”
Rev. David Lowe, a minister at Rock of Ages, said that the free COVID-19 testing is consistent with the church’s philosophy of reaching beyond its walls.
“We believe God has given us the vision to become compassionate Christians who are empowered by Christ to reach beyond the walls of the church building, to meet the holistic needs of our community,” he said.
For more information about this effort, visit the CERCL Facebook page www.facebook.com/CERC.loyola or website at www.luc.edu/parkinson/cercl/.
If you would like to inquire about partnership opportunities or to make a donation, please email them directly @CERCL@luc.edu.
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