SUWANEE, Ga. — In the middle of the nation's highest COVID surge since the start of the pandemic, one Metro Atlanta testing site is being forced to close soon. It comes as COVID positivity rates near 40% statewide, and the demand for tests continues to climb.
That overwhelming demand is backing up traffic outside Emergent Testing's Suwanee location. Naaz Malek co-owns the company, which started in 2020 and provides testing and vaccination in metro Atlanta, South Carolina and Texas.
"The numbers have essentially gone up four fold," Malek said. "It's like a triple whammy. Not only do we have cold and flu season, we also have the holidays. It’s the first holiday season where people felt more free or more safe to travel, and then comes this variant. We have the kind of trifecta that set the stage for extremely large volumes.”
The traffic gridlock blocked businesses from getting their normal traffic flow, which captured the attention of the landlord who owns the property housing the testing site and other businesses. Malek said the landlord received several complaints about the traffic. 11Alive reached out to the landlord, but he said he could not discuss the decision to close down the popular testing site.
“Our intent is to just help people, but when patients are coming from all directions and we have no space to put them in the lot, we have to turn them around," Malek said. “It’s not fair for businesses, small businesses who are already hurting because of the pandemic, to take the brunt of not being able to have a good successful business day because cars can’t get into their lot, because they’re backing up traffic from our parking lot.”
Malek said the site, serving as the largest such site in Suwanee, had done nearly 100,000 tests since the start of 2021 and was averaging about 1,000 tests per day. In an attempt to mitigate the traffic issues, Malek turned the one-time drive-thru testing and vaccination site into an appointment-only location. However, Malek mentioned COVID spreading among staff recently, and now time is running out for her site to stay open.
Pradeep Dani frequently gets tests at the Suwanee site out of convenience. 11Alive caught up with Dani just after he got a booster dose of the COVID vaccine.
“This is much worse than what we’ve seen with COVID where we’ve actually seen any impact at all," Dani said. "The last couple of weeks, pretty much half our friends are infected. I can already see things are getting overwhelmed in terms of people getting infected, so they’re jumping at every opportunity to test. It’s going to get harder, I guess.”
Malek said she was talking to city officials and the local Chamber of Commerce to try and find another location for the testing site. The closest sites are in Decatur and Stone Mountain.
In response to heightened demand for testing, the Georgia Department of Public Health said it is considering opening up a mass testing site near Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
“There’s also limitations that prevent them, as the government entities that they are, from implementing something so large," Malek said. "There are other players in the market that have already started mega sites in partnership with DPH.”