Of the state’s seven largest counties, Palm Beach County is way behind.

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In a state climbing the ranks of the most infected by coronavirus, Palm Beach County, one of its most populous counties, is woefully behind testing its population any way you cut the numbers.

The third largest county in the state, Palm Beach ranks dead last among Florida’s seven largest metropolitan areas in testing per capita, with roughly 81 per every 100,000 people tested.

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As of Wednesday evening, the county of 1.4 million people had tested 1,166. Those tests revealed 141 people sick with the respiratory illness that has no treatment or cure.

Certainly, many more are lurking Broward has tested 3,972 people and found 412 sick but the only way to gauge the infection’s spread here is to test more people.

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"Each day that passes is one that the virus is circulating, and we don’t know how bad it is in Palm Beach County," County Commissioner Mack Bernard told The Palm Beach Post Wednesday morning when told of the ranking. "I’m flabbergasted and baffled by the lack of testing in Palm Beach County."

If the problem isn’t resolved quickly, Bernard says the county may have to order people to stay at home.

The county has been asking state and local health officials to ramp up, Bernard said. "All I know is I just got the runaround."

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County Mayor Dave Kerner on Wednesday announced the first breakthrough on the testing front, saying the governor and state emergency manangers have signed the necessary paperwork for the county to get a FEMA sponsored testing site.

The only caveat, Kerner said, is the county must supply its own swabs. The county had workers online as he spoke seeking to buy testing material on the open market, he said.

Local state health department spokesman Alexander Shaw said a "big part" of the reason the county hasn’t tested as many people as its neighbors to the south is that the county lacks a government testing site.

"This is why there is a considerable difference in testing in these two counties at the moment compared to PBC. Hopefully this will change," Shaw wrote this week.

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It will take a lot to catch up with Broward and Miami-Dade where testing rates are double or nearly double Palm Beach County’s. Broward tests 206 of every 100,000 residents. Miami-Dade has tested about 137 per 100,000. (Hillsborough, which come nearest to this county in population is at 131 tested per 100,000.)

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services worked with the state to do mass testing under the CDC guidelines in Duval, Orange and Miami-Dade counties. They were picked because of their geography — spread out across the state — and the size of their venue, according to the state emergency operations officials.

"For instance, the Orange County Convention Center is the second largest convention center in the nation, and in January 2020, the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens hosted the Super Bowl, which drew over 62,000 attendees," according to an email from the Joint Information Center on COVID-19 for the State of Florida.

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In Broward, government testing operated out of a park in Pembroke Pines, where the Florida National Guard assisted in collecting nearly 3,600 samples. Guardsmen also were on hand at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, where more than 2,300 samples were collected, the Florida National Guard reported Wednesday.

The guard also assisted in screenings at the airports in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Jacksonville and Tampa.

Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Orlando might have gotten early government attention because they are hubs of international travel and direct flights or cruises out of the country — Palm Beach is not, said Dr. Larry Bush, president of the Palm Beach County Medical Society and an infectious disease specialist.

Only two public screenings have been attempted in Palm Beach County.

The first, hosted by the nonprofit health center FoundCare, closed within 48 hours, having booked more than 200 residents for its Palm Springs drive-thru and turned away nearly 6,000 more.

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Not quite a week later, a private lab in Boca Raton announced it would test 100 people in similar appointment-then-drive-thru fashion.

The U.S. stumbled out of the blocks when it came to testing for coronavirus, first by issuing botched test kits to states. More than a month later, the nation remains leagues behind countries including China, Korea and Italy, but also Greece, Austria, the United Kingdom and Australia when it comes to testing rates.

Americans have been tested at about 100 people per every million The U.K. posts rates three or four times higher and Italy tests more than 2,000 per million, South Korea more than 5,000 per million.

The states have had to combat a shortage of labs at one time only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was processing samples. Eventually state labs and then private labs were allowed to get in the game.

’You’re going to see a lot more testing’

Closer to home, Dr. Alina Alonso, who heads the Palm Beach County office of the state health department, said a shortage of testing kits wasn’t a problem, but people to do the swabbing was. She talked about a concerted effort to change that in the days before FoundCare opened its phone lines.

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The next hope may come from hospitals that now have been cleared to calibrate their labs to do faster, in-house tests for the virus, said Bush, an infectious disease specialist at Wellington Medical Center.

"You’re going to see a lot more testing and a lot more positives," Bush said. He said he is heartened that the mortality rate in the county is low. So far, three have died and 20 have been hospitalized.

Hillsborough, a county with only a couple thousand fewer residents, however is doing better on all counts. It has tested 1,896 people — about 131 per 100,000 or 50 more residents per 100,000 as in Palm Beach County.

Home to Tampa, the county also reports no deaths and 12 people hospitalized, according to Wednesday’s report from the state.

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While we aren’t a hub of international travel, we are a magnet for one COVID-19 hotspot: New York.

Which further upsets Commissioner Bernard.

"Especially since we have such a huge elderly population, you want to stop the introduction of the pandemic," Bernard said. But New Yorkers are coming in by the scores, while hundreds of emails and calls are pouring into the county from residents who want to be tested.

"Whatever is being done is not being coordinated and our residents in Palm Beach County are not being taken care of. We need to sound the alarm."

Staff writer Chris Persaud contributed to this story.

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