BATON ROUGE - As of Wednesday (Feb. 3), the Louisiana Department of Health reports that a total of 5,412,079 individuals in Louisiana have been tested for COVID-19.

This may seem like a large number, but city-Parish officials in East Baton Rouge are concerned that it should be even larger. They say many African American citizens have yet to be tested.

EBR Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome addressed this concern in a recent interview with WBRZ, saying, "We want to work with the African American community that is often a vulnerable community when it comes to COVID 19 because of the lack of access to health care and the disparities that exist in the health care space. We want to encourage and uplift their participation in getting tested." 

Mayor Broome hopes to mitigate the issue by making use of a federally funded program that will help the city-Parish reach its goal of testing an additional 2,000 individuals in East Baton Rouge Parish.

In addition to these community testing efforts, the $1.8 million federal grant will support research aimed at identifying barriers to testing and providing effective strategies for the implementation of expanded testing efforts.

As an initial step in community COVID-19 testing efforts, a Thursday (Feb. 4) morning testing event will take place at 10 a.m.

Interested citizens should report to the OLOL North LSU Health Clinic (5439 Airline Highway, Baton Rouge, LA 70805).

The testing event and related research will take place due to a collaboration between EBR city-Parish and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.