Employees of the Village of Bourbonnais and Village of Manteno have been offered to be tested by Riverside Healthcare for COVID-19.
“Knock on wood, not one Village employee has tested positive,” said Bourbonnais Mayor Paul Shore during Monday night’s Village Board meeting. “Although we will be doing testing of the Village employees on Wednesday via Riverside Hospital.”
The tests will be conducted for Village employees in the Community Room in Bourbonnais on Wednesday. The tests are part of Riverside’s efforts to ramp up COVID-19 testing for the community.
Last Friday, Riverside Healthcare CEO Phil Kambic said he’d like to test half the community. By that goal, a little over 50,000 tests need to be run. At that rate, it’s roughly four months of testing in the Community.
“There’s a standing joke with my team. I’m like, ‘What happens if we do 299 tests in a week? We failed. I want 3,000 tests per week guys.’ That’s what we need to do if we want to reopen back up. We need to test the community. We need to test the population.” Kambic said Friday.
Riverside announced on Friday it can test 3,000 people per week in the community. Kambic said new testing equipment arrived on site at the Hospital the week prior.
“The more people we can test, the better off we’re going to be,” said Kambic.
Riverside Healthcare has already run testing efforts in Pembroke and Sun River Terrance and is scheduled to perform testing for the community in Iroquois County at their Watseka Campus for free next Monday, May 11th. Preregistration is required.
Iroquois County announced their first COVID-19 death last Sunday.
Mayor Timothy Nugent announced Monday night testing was offered by Riverside Healthcare for village employees but had only received the information minutes before the meeting. Details are expected to be announced soon internally to Village employees for their testing date.
“I hope more employees take advantage of that free testing and let’s see where we’re at and make sure we’re in good shape.” Mayor Shore added during Monday’s Village of Bourbonnais meeting.
To date, no village or city employees are known to have tested positive for COVID-19 across Kankakee County. Information however is limited due to HIPAA regulations.
