SAN ANTONIO — A new sign up on Sonterra Boulevard in Stone Oak shows a new opportunity for Bexar County residents looking for answers.
Paul Basaldua and his team have set up a new drive-thru testing site guaranteeing coronavirus results in 24 hours.
"This is just another way to help out the community," Basaldua said via video chat. "Every day at 5:00, a courier comes and picks up our samples and drives them to the lab in Houston and we have staff working overnight in Houston so that we can expedite those results."
But no matter how fast the answers come, it appears fewer people want them.
KENS 5 worked through the numbers made available by the state and what we found was a big drop in testing.
On average, Texas administered 64,000 tests daily in mid-July but just two weeks after that, the daily average dropped to roughly 36,000; that's about a 42% decrease.
"We have testing available, but the demand is not there," San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said in a news conference on Tuesday.
The city admitted testing is down but so is the positivity rate.
"We know that that positivity rate the week of July 4th was over 25% it's now down to a little over 12%," added Dr. Colleen Bridger, interim Metro Health director. "That said, that doesn't mean it's time to throw away the masks and pretend like nothing bad ever happened. We're really at this precarious state where we're trending in the right direction but we're also headed towards schools reopening, towards labor day and so we could flip that switch and head right back up to that positivity rate in the 20 and 30% and we don't want that."
That's something Basaldua said he would want either, but stressed if the need is there, his testing site will be.
"We can get you results pretty quickly," he insisted.
Meanwhile, at Thursday evening's coronavirus briefing, Metro Health Medical Director Junda Woo said there are no clear answers for why testing numbers at city-run sites have gone down.
"I couldn't say why. The good answer is fewer people have symptoms, the bad answer is it was taking a long time to get results," Woo said. "If people are not getting tested becasue they think that, (they should know) the timeframe has been shortened."
She said San Antonio this week is hovering at around 1,000 tests every day at individual city-run sites. At its peak, those sites were churning out closer to 3,000 tests a day earlier this summer.