Rite Aid To Begin Drive-Thru Coronavirus Testing In Rockland

ROCKLAND COUNTY, NY — Rite Aid will open a drive-thru coronavirus testing site Saturday at its store on Route 303 in Valley Cottage. The site will be open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and use self-swab nasal testing.

People will perform self-swab tests in the store’s parking lot, overseen by Rite Aid pharmacists. Rite Aid expects to be able to conduct more than 200 tests daily.

Eligible people will be required to schedule appointments online.

Testing will be free to patients meeting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria, which can be found here. Patients are required to provide government issued identification, be at least 18 years old and need to pre-register online in order to schedule a time slot for testing.

As part of the testing process, people must remain in their vehicles from the time they arrive and until they depart.

Rite Aid officials said they have partnered with Verily and its Baseline COVID-19 to provide screening, scheduling and return of results to patients.

Rite-Aid has already opened four similar testing sites in Pennsylvania. At the time, "We plan to have additional testing sites at stores across seven states in the coming weeks," Heyward Donigan, Rite Aid president and CEO, said in a release. "Through our partnership with the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and with tremendous support from state and local officials, we will significantly expand COVID-19 testing to more than 5,000 tests daily in our country's key hot spots when fully operational."

Those spots include New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan and Virginia.

Rite Aid officials said they selected BioReference Laboratories to provide COVID-19 laboratory testing to all drive-up locations. Clinical oversight for the COVID-19 testing program is provided by PWNHealth, a national clinician network that enables safe and easy access to diagnostic testing. The goal is flattening the curve through accessible diagnostic testing.