People with coronavirus symptoms and anyone over 65 will soon be able to get almost immediate results at two South Florida testing sites.
Marlins Park and Hard Rock Stadium COVID-19 testing sites will be offering antigen testing results in 15 minutes for those two groups of people beginning this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday.
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"People want to know, and want those results back," DeSantis said at a news conference at Broward Health in Fort Lauderdale.
DeSantis said both sites will still offer a lane for traditional testing for asymptomatic people, but with a longer delay in results.
The change is part of the state's effort to make improvements in testing turnaround, DeSantis said. He said the current backlog of 7 to 10 days makes the result of a diagnostic test meaningless.
"Obviously if you are somebody that is symptomatic and you don’t get your result back for 7 days that is not helpful. For asymptomatic test takers, if it takes 7 days then the test is basically useless at that time," DeSantis said. "Because even if you were infectious the minute you tested, by the time you get it back, you probably haven’t been isolating anyway, and you are likely not to be infectious on the back end of that.”
