By: Brittany Brooks

This week, we’re shining the spotlight on one of Nashville’s health care professionals who’s fighting to save lives during a global pandemic. Dr. Cherae Farmer-Dixon is the Dean of the School of Dentistry at Meharry Medical College. As the numbers continue to rise, she serves as the head site leader for all three COVID assessment sites in the Nashville area. Since testing for the public started, Dr. Farmer-Dixon has been responsible for ensuring that her and her team have all the available resources to provide to the community. “This is an opportunity for us to work with other entities within the community that have the same compassion and concern for making certain that we’re doing our part in protecting our community and making it easily accessible for them to have testing,” Dr. Farmer-Dixon said. Her team has been partnering with various churches throughout the city to help provide free testing for the public.

With new cases, new hospitalizations and new deaths, Dr. Farmer-Dixon is fighting to save lives. She hopes that providing additional testing on Saturday’s will allow people within the community who may not be able to make it during the work week, get out and get tested.

The testing is a mobile drive-up screening, where people can come and get tested in the comfort of their cars whether they potentially have COVID or not. “While we’re encouraging people to be tested, we want to also reinforce to them that it is a more comfortable experience now,” said Dr. Farmer-Dixon.

Since the pandemic reached the United States early this year in February, numbers are currently down in the number of people getting tested for COVID. “It’s hard to say if that is because there’s a decline in the virus, or if there’s just a decline in people wanting to be tested,” said Dr. Farmer-Dixon.

Meharry Medical College is a historically black college and university residing in a predominantly black neighborhood. Meharry’s focus is to encourage the community – especially people of color – to get tested. “We have partnered with churches throughout the city with a focus on POC that have a high prevalence for risk factors that make them disproportionally more susceptible to catching the virus as well as unfortunately succumbing to death from the virus,” said Farmer-Dixon.

She encourages everyone to keep washing their hands and practicing social distancing. She also recommends that people keep wipes and hand sanitizer in the car.