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NC, UNITED STATES -- 04.24.2020 Story by Staff Sgt. Mary Junell North Carolina National GuardNorth Carolina National Guard Soldiers with the 42nd, Civil Support Team worked with local health and emergency officials to conduct drive-thru and walk-thru COVID-19 testing for employees of a Chatham County food processing plant in Central North Carolina, April 23, 2020.
N.C. Health and Human Services, Piedmont Health, N.C. Emergency Management, and Health and Safety personnel from the processing plant were among the organizations on-site for day one of two days of testing.
The testing was in response to information received by Health and Human Services of an increase in COVID-19 infections.
Dr. Shannon Dowler, Chief Medical Officer for North Carolina Medicaid and the Vulnerable Population Workstream Leader for Health and Human Services during the COVID-19 Response said the call came in on April 17, 2020, from one of the community health center partners.
“They had noticed an increase in cases in the plant workers in their community they served,” she said. “As we dug into the numbers we saw that in fact, we were starting to see a trend and a rise in cases so we wanted to partner with the local community to make sure that we did reasonable testing and surveillance to get ahead of this so that we can plan where it might be traveling to next.”
As workers entered the plant’s parking lot, signs directed them to the far side where they could register and fill out paperwork and get the label needed for the nasal sample. Employees who did not drive to the plant could also walk up and register.
Employees were then directed to one of the drive-thru or walk-up testing locations where they were met by N.C. Guardsmen who were conducting the tests.
“This is what we exist for,” said Lt. Bradley Merritt, commander of the 42nd Civil Support Team, who are based out of Greenville, N.C. “We exist to help the community in times of need for chemical, biological, and radiation events. This sample-taking fits into our trademark.”
The Civil Support Team is a unique, full-time, National Guard Unit that Merritt said exists to support these types of missions.
“We’ve trained, we’ve figured out a lot of the processes and my guys are really good at doing this,” Merritt said. “This also helps up to develop a good rapport with health and emergency officials to show them what we can provide in the future with minimal manning and minimal impact on the locals.”
Dowler said the N.C. Guard team has been a great partnership in part because they were able to mobilize so quickly.
“Generally speaking, when you do an outreach of this size, something for this many people, you might spend weeks or even months planning for it but we don’t have the luxury of time right now,” she said. “The Guard was able to swoop in and help us with the logistics so we knew there were some pieces of it that we would own and take care of and then other pieces that the guard would take care of for us.”
The outreach is specifically for the employees of the plant and their immediate family members.
Dowler said the population being tested came to her attention as a vulnerable community, prompting the testing.
“A lot of the workers in our plants, who are part of our critical infrastructure in our country, our food supply chain, are critically important to us, but sometimes don’t have access to all the resources,” she said. “We wanted to make sure that this population was getting rapid testing and identification of risk.”
In addition to the testing, those who participated were also connected to health care through the local community health center.
The Guardsmen in conjunction with the local health and emergency officials were able to perform more than 170 tests on the first day and were hoping to complete 400 by the end of the event.
