FALL RIVER Free COVID-19 testing six days a week is an offer that’s hard to refuse.
The Cambridge company contracted by the state to administer mass vaccine inoculations at Gillette Stadium will also be providing free nasal-swab tests in a parking lot of Bristol Community College.
CIC Health, a subsidiary of Cambridge Innovation Center, or CIC for short, will do a soft opening of sorts on Saturday in parking lot number 3 in front of the BCC campus.
The Cambridge company has been contracted by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health as part of the state’s Stop the Spread program.
FALL RIVER Free COVID-19 testing in Fall River is not going away.
That’s according to Mayor Paul Coogan, who said Thursday that the city will continue to be included in the statewide Stop the Spread initiative that began last July.
The mayor said he’d been informed by his health department director Tess Curran that a “professional company” will assume the responsibility of collecting test samples after Jan. 15.
That date marks the contractual expiration of a months-long agreement between the state and Seven Hills Foundation and Stanley Street Treatment and Resources, or SSTAR.
Both nonprofit businesses have been offering free testing, sometimes at various sites, that haven’t required prior appointments.
FALL RIVER Moderna has come to SSTAR.
The first batch of COVID-19 vaccine doses manufactured by the Cambridge-based bio-tech company Moderna was delivered Tuesday to Fall River’s non-profit Stanley Street Treatment and Resources.
“We got 100 yesterday and surprise, surprise, another 100 today,” SSTAR chief executive Nancy Paull said on Wednesday.
Paull said 20 of her employees got a shot in the arm on Tuesday and another 20 were set to receive the same by the end of Wednesday.
She said beginning next Monday 40 employees each weekday will take the first of two Moderna vaccine shots inside the central building of SSTAR’s main campus at 400 Stanley St.
FALL RIVER Nancy Paull isn’t the only one champing at the bit for the first round of COVID-19 vaccines.
But unlike most of us, Paull knows just how overwhelming it can be trying to keep pace with testing requests.
“We’re at the tipping point here,” the chief executive of Stanley Street Treatment and Resources, or SSTAR, said, referring to the ongoing demand for free coronavirus testing.
Paull, who has been CEO of SSTAR for 34 years, says her non-profit which offers free coronavirus testing five days a week at its two Fall River sites has had a waiting list of people eager to be swabbed.