PLEASE DO NOT DONATE TO CHANGE.ORG AS WE DO NOT RECEIVE THE FUNDS. IF YOU WISH TO DONATE, PLEASE FOLLOW THIS GOFUNDME LINK: https://www.gofundme.com/f/five-days-of-free-covid19-testing-for-oakland-ca

Updated Petition- 12/10/20

Need for Free MASS COVID-19 testing by Alameda County medical professionals, organizations and volunteers 

ALAMEDA COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS' General Meeting 

Tuesday, December 8, 2020 9:30 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. 

Represented community member 

Hello Board of Supervisors, 

My name is Juner Ryan and I work as an ER Nurse at Highland Hospital, and I am a Public Health Nurse in San Francisco County. 

First, I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Board of Supervisors & Alameda County Leaders for all the hard work that you have done for testing capabilities in Alameda County. Your efforts should be commended.

Governor Newsom has enacted a weekly mandate to test health care workers starting this week due to alarming numbers of Covid cases on the rise. 

We believe that NOW, more than ever, is the time to help the county make testing accessible and convenient, with shorter turnaround times for the community, while helping alleviate the load on current free testing sites.  

HelpTestBayArea is a group of grassroots volunteers, made up of local community members, and frontline health care workers in Alameda County. 

Our vision with HelpTestBayArea, is to build a large volunteer group of health care workers and community members to help with COVID-19 testing. We are in a partnership with Caring Angels Foundation, which is a local Bay Area non-profit. 

There are still a lot of front liners and essential workers wanting to be tested in Alameda County. I know there is a high influx of people now going to Contra Costa’s free testing sites, after having tried getting tested in a timely manner in our Alameda County without  success.

It is our greatest desire to provide FREE MASS COVID-19 testing, in Oakland Arena’s parking lot.  We can also use the site to bring in other organizations, to help mass test.  Other cities have utilized their empty stadiums or parking lots for mass testing.  At this time, our local parking lot is not being used in the best way possible for our community right now.  Using Oakland Arena’s parking lot would be a strategic location to test due to easy access to BART and the freeway for drive-thru and walk-up testing.  

We want to follow Hayward’s fire’s role of testing 500 + a day, Santa Clara county and SAP center’s 5 day event (which tested 1000 plus a day, for 5 days, with approximately 8 staff members), and UCSF’s mass testing events that were conducted in Oakland. Our goal is  to replicate these initiatives in Alameda County.

The Alameda County medical community has been significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We recently lost a colleague to COVID-19. It is a great loss to Highland Hospital and  to the greater  EMS community.

The death toll isn't just a number. We all in this room have lost or known someone who has lost a loved one, whether it is a mother, father, brother, sister, daughter or son. Each lost life has an effect on the people they leave behind. 

Today, we are here requesting, from the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, to support, and approve our proposal, to use Oakland Arena’s parking lot, to help MASS TEST our  community. This will create a central location, to promote easy access to MASS testing. 

We have sent our proposal to the board of supervisors, with our plans, and logistics, of testing for Oakland Arena, at any capacity needed to mass test up  to 1200 plus people a day. 

We hope to bring the community and its leaders together to help combat the current upsurge of Covid

HelpTestBayArea.com

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Initiative to increase COVID-19 Testing.

We are a group of grassroots volunteers made up of local community members and frontline health care workers in Alameda County. Given the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is our great desire to provide a FREE multi-day COVID testing event in Oakland in order to help alleviate the strain on the health system, as well as to ensure access to testing for communities of color and lower socio-economic status that are historically underserved.

Coronavirus cases have spiked in recent days, and hospitalizations are up 32% across the state. We know the Latino and African American populations in East Oakland are being disproportionately affected, and thus, we want to ensure better testing access to our Spanish and Mam speaking community members as well as to other immigrant populations. We would like to help make sure that everyone who needs a test can get one.  

We were incredibly inspired by a similar initiative in Santa Clara County. By implementing a multi-collaborative effort, Santa Clara County succeeded in providing a five-day event for walk-up COVID-19 testing. They were able to administer roughly 1,000 tests daily. To learn more about the Santa Clara County initiative, please check the link detailing their efforts: http://www.sapcenter.com/events/detail/covid19walkuptesting. This type of initiative could be life-saving given the fact that Alameda county has had 1200+ positive cases in the last 2 weeks, outstripping Santa Clara county.  Even though testing has increased, access for most living in Alameda County is inadequate, as we see many people coming to the ER every day who are unaware of existing testing sites or unable to make appointments.  

We have already developed a website capable of scheduling and connecting volunteers and community members for testing at HelpTestBayArea.com. Our vision is to build a large volunteer group of health care workers to help with COVID-19 testing and we already have several dozen people at the ready, many with previous testing and ER experience. We've obtained a non-profit designation as a charitable organization.

To achieve this goal of a large multi-day testing event, we need support and approval from Alameda County for the testing site and dates. Moreover, we also need an Alameda County Department of Public Health physician to assist us in order to ensure that proper protocols are followed and the correct permits are used so as to be aligned with the regulations set forth by Alameda County. Our initial fundraising efforts  have been made via GoFundMe

We are currently looking for help with:

1. Oakland Arena Parking Lot approval

2. Partnership to help test the community

This project is driven by passion and the overall knowledge that this initiative will help save lives. We CAN help stop the spread of the virus during this crucial time as we open the economy.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Spanish Petition
https://www.change.org/HelpTestBayAreaPetitionSpanish

Tagalog Petition
https://www.change.org/HelpTestBayAreaPetitionTagalog

Korean Petition

https://www.change.org/HelpTestBayAreaPetitionKorean

Cantonese Petition
https://www.change.org/HelpTestBayAreaPetitionCantonese

Mandarin Petition
https://www.change.org/HelpTestBayAreaPetitionMandarin