Webinar Delivers Latest on COVID-19 Testing and Resources for Communities

Our latest webinar for community-based organizations opened with a bit of real-life drama: The first speaker delivered his remarks from the hallway of a clinic where his daughter was getting a PCR test after being sent home from school with possible COVID symptoms.

“We did an at-home test, it came back negative, but we’re here getting a PCR test so that she can hopefully get back to school soon,” explained Cameron Webb, MD, JD, senior policy advisor for equity on the White House COVID-19 Response Team. “This is what it’s all about… the ability to test when it’s unexpected—when you’re supposed to be on a call doing a presentation but instead you need to get a family member tested. We want that to be available for everybody.”

Nearly 1,000 people attended the February 3 webinar, “The Latest on COVID-19 Testing: What Your Community Needs to Know,” held in partnership with the Vaccine Equity Cooperative and Health Leads. The event was moderated by CDC Foundation Chief Medical Officer Lisa Waddell, MD, MPH, and included Dr. Webb; Alice Chen, MD, senior advisor at Made to Save; and two speakers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—Jasmine Chaitram, MPH, lead for the Expansion of Screening and Diagnostics Task Force, and John Barnes, PhD, team lead, Strain Surveillance and Emerging Variants.

The webinar focused on communication and collaboration between the federal government and grassroots organizations to improve testing capacity, distribution, equitable access, affordability and educational outreach to include information on how different tests are performed and what to do if you test positive.

Among the key takeaways:

• In the two weeks since the launch for free, at-home tests, more than 60 million people ordered tests through the Biden Administration’s covidtests.gov website, available in English, Spanish and Chinese. There is also a call line, 1-800-232-0233, with access to information in more than 150 languages.
• The Administration’s plan is to send 500 million to one-billion tests directly to people’s homes and to work with community organizations to reach people experiencing homelessness or other challenges to access. 
• CDC’s Increased Community Access to Testing (ICATT) program supports no-cost testing in pharmacies and other specific locations in communities that have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
• CDC’s Operation Expanded Testing (OpET) supports no-cost testing to child-care centers, K-12 schools, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), under-resourced communities, and congregate settings such as homeless shelters, domestic violence and abuse shelters, non-federal correctional facilities and other qualified sites. 
• CDC’s webpage on self-testing includes infographics, videos and other resources on how to use a self-test and how to interpret the results. CDC expects to add more videos soon and is working to develop materials for the blind and deaf populations. 

This was the ninth in a series of CDC Foundation webinars tailored to CBOs and their partners. All the webinar recordings are archived on our CBO Resource Page. 

This blog post is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $68,939,536 with 100 percent funded by CDC/HHS. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, CDC/HHS or the U.S. Government.