MOULTRIE, Ga. — Is COVID over?

Two days after a federal judge struck down a mask mandate on public transportation, the Southwest Georgia Public Health District has closed Colquitt County’s primary COVID testing site.

K.K. Snyder, a spokeswoman for the public health district, said demand for the tests has decreased, and the district’s website, swhealthdistrict.org, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has classified all of the counties in the district as regions of low transmission.

Snyder said Wednesday morning that the MAKO Medical testing site at the former Colquitt County High School is closed. On its last day Tuesday, it administered nine tests, she said.

The only testing sites that remain open in the district are in Albany. Testing takes place 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday-Friday at 1150 W. Oakridge Drive and 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays at 1710 S. Slappey Blvd.

The Colquitt County Health Department, 214 W. Central Ave., also has some tests available.

The public health district’s website includes a link to schedule a COVID-19 test, and it also includes a link where a person can order free at-home tests. At-home tests are available from many local pharmacies too, but they are not free.

The MAKO site opened early in the pandemic, although its schedule has varied significantly over time. The president of Colquitt Regional Medical Center is concerned that the health district is closing it too soon.

Jim Matney, president and CEO of the Moultrie hospital, said after the announcement Wednesday that the hospital had performed 68 COVID tests the previous day.

“The fact that our county is shutting down testing is shameful,” Matney said.

Matney said that since the testing site is closed, he expects more people will go to the hospital for a COVID test. Asking them to travel to Albany doesn’t make sense, he said. He cited multiple community needs assessments that identify transportation as being a major local shortcoming.

“To tell them they have to go to Dougherty County is unacceptable,” he said.

He said many businesses won’t accept at-home test results to excuse workers for COVID’s lengthy isolation; the workers still need to get the results confirmed through the PCR test performed in doctor’s offices, the hospital and, until Wednesday, at the MAKO site. Those tests take about three days to get results back from an independent lab.

And they’re more expensive to the patient. Testing at the MAKO site was free, but the hospital will bill you and your insurance company more than $200 per test, Matney said.

Matney said he’s also concerned about what happens if there is another surge of cases.

“That’s what happened last time,” he said. “They shut it down and we had a surge and we had to beg them to bring it back.” 

Closure of the testing site comes almost exactly three months after the county’s highest one-day case count. On Jan. 15, the county confirmed 134 new cases of COVID-19, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health website, https://dph.georgia.gov/covid-19-status-report. However, the number of cases has been in sharp decline since then. 

The DPH website, updated Wednesday afternoon, shows 10 confirmed cases so far this month, three of them in the last week.

Jordan Hammack, Colquitt Regional Medical Center’s assistant director of marketing, said Wednesday that the hospital and Sterling Physician Group, a group of doctors’ offices affiliated with Colquitt Regional, have had five positive COVID tests in the past seven days with one of them being a COVID-positive in-patient.

The difference in those numbers may be a reporting issue: The hospital reports tests performed at its facilities while the DPH reports tests performed on patients based on what county those patients reside in, so a person from outside Colquitt County who was tested at the hospital would show up on Colquitt Regional’s list but would be reported in his home county on the DPH site.

The Colquitt County School System has posted weekly COVID reports on its website. The reports have listed no COVID cases among students or faculty since March 7. The report posted that day included two students and one faculty member who had tested positive in the preceding week.

Altogether, 171 deaths in Colquitt County have been attributed to the coronavirus, including one in April, according to the DPH website. An additional 71 deaths are considered probably related to the virus.