BANFF – The Town of Banff is lobbying the province of Alberta for a testing site in town as COVID-19 numbers soar in Banff National Park.
Although testing is under the jurisdiction of Alberta Health Services (AHS), the Town of Banff has been working hard with the health authority and independent local medical clinics to increase COVID-19 testing capacity in the community.
“Local COVID testing is really important because we have many workers who don’t have the means to travel to the nearest AHS testing centre in Cochrane, or Calgary,” said Jason Darrah, the Town of Banff’s communications director.
As of Sunday afternoon (Nov. 22), Banff and Lake Louise had 122 active cases, up from 108 the day before. In neighbouring Canmore, there were 43 positive cases and five the MD of Bighorn.
A total of 1,584 positive cases were identified in Alberta on Sunday, bringing the total number of active cases province-wide to 12,195. Of those 319 are in hospital and 60 in intensive care.
Testing in Banff has been conducted by two medical clinics that generously volunteered since the onset of the pandemic to provide this service – Bear Street Family Physicians and Banff Alpine Medical Clinic.
“But our clinics have limited resources to meet the rising need, while still supporting their ongoing patient care,” Darrah said.
“For example, last week Bear Street had to reduce to only providing testing for their existing patients.”
Additional space where testing can occur has been secured and the Town helped facilitate work to improve access and specialized use of the space, but AHS has to certify any space used for testing.
As a result, Alpine Medical Clinic was able to increase the number of tests that clinic does per day with a new space, which is the site of the former Yoga Studio next door, on Friday (Nov. 20).
“We also have identified several other spaces in our community that we can secure for a testing site, if AHS decides to establish a mobile testing unit,” Darrah said.
“We have been encouraging AHS to set up local mobile testing in the Town for quite a while.”
The Town of Banff has also offered to facilitate any other needs of the staff coming to Banff, and other resources like clerical support for clinics or AHS.
“It is a lot of clerical work for every test, and there are extremely high needs for privacy protection,” Darrah said.
Banff residents can use the AHS online assessment and then request a test booking online. When they enter the Banff postal code, Cochrane will come up as a testing centre option.
A statement from AHS said that as demand for testing increases, AHS will look to collaborate with partners in the Bow Valley area to look at further options for providing additional testing as required.
