Gov. Beshear announced Monday that Kentucky’s Department for Public Health is partnering with the University of Kentucky and UK HealthCare ​to begin free drive-up COVID-19 testing for the community. Officials said the testing will begin Aug. 24 at two sites.

“Kentucky remains at war with the coronavirus, and a robust testing program is essential to protecting one another, fully reopening our economy and getting all of our children back in classrooms,” Gov. Beshear said. “I want to thank the University of Kentucky and UK HealthCare for stepping up with this partnership to provide the community with this free public health resource. Everyone should take advantage of these testing opportunities and be part of Team Kentucky’s push to defeat COVID-19.”

Beginning Aug. 24, community testing will be available in the new parking lot on College Way near the UK motor pool on the far southern edge of campus as well as on the grounds of Eastern State Hospital, which UK operates and manages for the state. The hospital is located off of Newtown Pike near the Interstate Highway 64/75 exchange. Eastern State is located at UK’s Coldstream Research Campus.

All testing will be available by scheduling an appointment. To receive a free COVID-19 test, an individual can register at: lexington.wildhealth.com. Testing will be seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

More information on testing opportunities at more than 200 sites throughout the commonwealth can be found here.

Dr. Steven Stack, commissioner of the Kentucky Department for Public Health, explained that Kentucky is one of only a few states that has been able to maintain the same COVID-19 testing capacity in recent weeks as supplies necessary to run those tests are in greater and greater demand across the country.

“Test supplies are getting tight again. The demand for the tests continues to grow more quickly than the resources to provide the tests. So we are likely to be at some kind of plateau in number of tests for a while, but it’s going to be a challenge just to maintain the plateau because a lot of other states are going to compete now more intensely to try to get these resources,” said Dr. Stack. “But we’re going to work really hard to make sure we keep access to that. If we keep that, that’s just under 60,000 tests a week on average. That’s about 4.7% of the total population of Kentucky we would be testing. The White House’s initial guidelines were to test over 2%.”