The City of San Antonio will be adding three new COVID-19 testing sites through a partnership with Community Labs to address testing capacity and wait times that some have said lasted hours.

The Texas Board of Nursing is reporting an increase in the number of registered nurses notifying it that they want their license to become inactive.

It’s not only major hospitals that are seeing more COVID-19 patients in San Antonio. Some local urgent care clinics are also reaching capacity.

SAN ANTONIO – Texas MedClinic will be offering a limited supply of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at four of its locations beginning Thursday, March 25 through Wednesday, March 31. Texas MedClinic acquired the vaccines through the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District. “Supporting Metro Health and our community has been a top priority, especially throughout the pandemic,” said Texas MedClinic Chief Medical Officer and practicing physician Dr. David Gude. According to the news release, Texas MedClinic was the first in the region to offer a COVID-19 rapid antigen test that provided results in 15 minutes. Since the onset of the pandemic, close to 300,000 rapid antigen tests have been administered across 19 clinic locations.

Texas MedClinic established a new COVID-19 testing location on the city's South Side intended to care for underserved communities. SAN ANTONIO – Texas MedClinic, an area urgent care clinic system, will not be offering the COVID-19 vaccine to patients and instead will focus on testing for the virus, the company confirmed on Tuesday. Texas MedClinic says it has been performing more than 1,200 COVID-19 tests per day across 19 clinics. The high demand for testing will limit the clinic system’s ability to offer the vaccine as soon as available, the company said in a statement. Dr. David Gude, chief operating officer of Texas MedClinic, said the group had become among the first private providers to offer the COVID-19 test in March.

Texas MedClinic introduced the region’s first rapid antigen test in May and has since conducted more than 200,000 rapid antigen tests across their 19 clinics in San Antonio, New Braunfels, Spring Branch, Austin and Round Rock. “People want to know quickly if they have COVID-19, and if they could be infecting others,” said Dr. David Gude, Texas MedClinic chief operating officer and practicing physician. “We introduced curbside testing during the surge in June/July to accommodate the testing needs of our communities.”Gude provided some insight on commonly asked questions regarding COVID-19 testing. “If you have COVID-19 symptoms, a medical evaluation is required, so curbside testing is not an option,” Gude said. The cost for the rapid COVID-19 tests is covered by insurance plans or through government-sponsored programs.

SAN ANTONIO – As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, local doctors say “COVID fatigue” is real as residents get sick, not of the coronavirus but of dealing with it. “Last week, I was seeing several people who went to a wedding,” Gude said. So they had the wedding, and now multiple people are ill.”Despite instances like this, Bexar County case numbers remained relatively low until Monday since the large wave of cases this summer. “I don’t think that it’s because we have a shield on,” Gude said, regarding Bexar County’s previously low case numbers. This represents the biggest single-day reported increase of cases since late July, aside from Sep. 29, when the city reported 469 cases, including 207 backlogged cases.

Speaking at the Thursday nightly briefing, Metro Health Chief of Epidemiology Rita Espinoza said the asymptomatic cases will now also be listed as “probable” cases in the city’s COVID-19 statistics. Without one, though, they weren’t recorded as a case, and no contact tracing efforts were conducted. The group recommended all antigen positive lab reports be counted as “probable” cases and investigated the same. A positive result from one of these tests is enough to consider a case “confirmed,” under state definitions, compared to the “probable” label that positive antigen test results get. “That means that you can count on a positive test being positive,” Gude said.

SAN ANTONIO – A chain of urgent care clinics with locations in the San Antonio area says it will offer 15-minute COVID-19 tests beginning Tuesday. Texas MedClinic announced in a news release it will use a test manufactured by Quidel that should give patients results before they leave the clinic. We trust their diagnostic technology, which is promising close to 100 percent accuracy on positive COVID-19 test results, and 80 percent accuracy on negative COVID-19 tests,” said Texas MedClinic COO Dr. David Gude in the release. The Texas MedClinic tests will be the first local use of a rapid antigen test. Texas MedClinic has 19 clinics in San Antonio, New Braunfels, Austin and Round Rock.