Need a COVID test in Cary? No-appointment testing site opening at WakeMed Soccer Park
The state health department will open a new COVID-19 testing site at WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary on Wednesday.
Operated by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services and its testing vendor, Mako Medical, the new site, at 940 E. Chatham St., will be open from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m. weekdays, and will not require appointments, according to a news release from the town of Cary.
Instead, anyone who wants to get tested will need to register beforehand with Mako Medical at mako.exchange/scheduler/registration/?location=5357.
The site will only offer PCR tests, and is expected to deliver results within 24 to 28 hours, the release stated. The site is currently slated to stay open through the end of January.
The new site is at least the fourth mass testing site DHHS has opened in Wake County to meet a surge in demand for COVID-19 testing that began soon after the detection of the highly transmissible omicron variant in North Carolina last month.
In the last two weeks of December, the daily number of appointments being booked for tests at Wake County’s separate testing sites more than doubled, increasing from fewer than 6,000 on Dec. 21 to more than 14,000 on Dec. 28, according to data provided by county spokesperson Stacy Beard.
In the first few days of 2022, the county continued receiving more than 13,000 appointments daily.
To accommodate increased demand, DHHS opened drive-thru testing sites at PNC Arena in Raleigh and Five County Stadium in Zebulon in the last week of December. Those were launched after another site opened at Word of God Assembly Church in Southeast Raleigh.
Like those sites, the WakeMed Soccer Park site will not carry any out-of-pocket costs for customers.
Staff onsite will ask for insurance information for those who have it, but insurance is not required, the Cary release stated.
This story was originally published January 11, 2022 at 1:05 PM.
