DENVER, CO — The drive-up testing site at Pepsi Center is now only able to run 2,000 tests per day, Denver officials announced Tuesday. The daily cap is “due to an increase in national demand for COVID-19 tests,” the city said. The testing site will close as soon as the cap is reached. On Tuesday, the site closed at 12:30 p.m.
To find out how many tests have been administered, the city is providing updates every 30 minutes here.
The Pepsi Center site is free and open to anyone who believes they have been exposed to the virus.
The increase in demand for tests comes as many states battle a surge of coronavirus cases. The United States on Wednesday surpassed 3 million confirmed cases of the new coronavirus, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. To date, the virus has claimed nearly 131,600 American lives.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, spoke out on the recent spike in coronavirus cases, linking it to states that “stepped on the gas” while reopening.
Bir told Wharton Business Daily on Tuesday that while states in the Northeast are experiencing a “slight uptick,” the situations there are much more controlled now than in the South, which opened much more abruptly.
“The South, which didn’t experience a significant outbreak through the March-April time frame, I think came at this opening in a different way than the Northeast or the Midwest that had experience with the outbreak,” Birx said.
Several states experiencing spikes also ignored guidelines put in place by federal and local public health officials as they reopened, Birx added.
“And so when they opened, instead of gating closely through all of the recommended gates, a lot of individuals and a lot of businesses, instead of driving 25 in a 25-mile-an-hour zone, stepped on the gas and started going 65, and it’s really evident now in the spread of cases across most age groups,” she said.
In the first five days of July, the United States reported its three largest daily totals, and 14 states recorded single-day highs, The New York Times reported.
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>> More information about how to get tested at the Pepsi Center site can be found here.
>> Patch editor Beth Dalbey contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on the Denver Patch