One week after announcing a plan to provide comprehensive coronavirus testing to all Vineyard residents, Quest Diagnostics, Island Health Care, the six Vineyard boards of health and a bevy of volunteers have been working tirelessly to put the project in motion.

“So very much needs to be done,” said Cynthia Mitchell, the director of Island Health Care. “This will be a pretty big operation.”

At a press briefing on Friday, Ms. Mitchell said a limited rollout of the testing will begin May 28. The testing will take place at the high school, and will be focused at first on high priority groups, including first responders and public safety personnel, medical and dental workers, grocery and convenience store employees, as well as those volunteering or working at emergency food delivery sites.

Because the call-in center for pre-registering for tests will not be up and running until June 1, Island health agents have reached out to people in those first priority groups to schedule their tests in the interim.

“What we’re looking at in the first several days is what we’re calling a soft launch,” Ms. Mitchell said. “We will be doing outreach to pull the first group in rather than wait for them to come to us.”

At the briefing, Ms. Mitchell and public health agents Maura Valley and Matt Poole provided further details about the scope of testing, and said the response from the initial priority groups had already been enthusiastic.

“I’ve had a very strong response from the folks that I’ve reached out to,” Mr. Poole said. “Stop & Shop did get back very, very enthusiastic about the opportunity.”

The second round of priority testing will include people 65 or older, as well as individuals with chronic health conditions but who may be otherwise asymptomatic, people living in multifamily or congregate housing, and senior housing residents and workers.

“Anyone on these first lists are highly recommended for testing,” Ms. Mitchell said on Friday. “However it’s not just a one-time shot. These individuals, and any others as we open up the test site, may call the dedicated phone line June 1 or after to register and make an appointment in the weeks following.”

Once the call center is open, testing will be expanded to Islanders outside the first two priority groups, Ms. Mitchell said. At that point, anyone will be able to call in and schedule a test, but individuals outside the first two groups may have their tests pushed back a week or more because of the high expected initial volume, Ms. Mitchell estimated.

“I think you can quickly see that the numbers here are likely to be in the hundreds,” Ms. Mitchell said on Friday.

The testing was made possible through a unique public-private partnership between Quest Diagnostics — one of the largest private labs and coronavirus testing companies in the country — and Island health officials. The federally qualified community health center Island Health Care is serving as Quest’s on-the-ground testing and contact-tracing partner. Tests will be provided without any expected out of pocket payment from patients.

The call-in center is part of the project budget and will be set up through a Florida-based company that IHC currently uses for its after-hours medical requests.

The logistics of providing the tests remain complicated. Right now, IHC is looking at having three drive-through testing lanes at the high school and has spent the past week scoping the premises.

On Friday, Mr. Poole explained the proposed layout of the testing facility. At the northernmost end of the high school’s Performing Arts Center parking lot, there will be a 10-by-10 “greeter tent” to first connect patients with on-site staff. Drivers will then be guided forwarded and queued into the lanes by volunteer parking monitors, and directed toward the front of the Performing Arts Center.

Mr. Poole said there will be three 20-by-30 drive through tents for testing where buses normally pick up students, as well as another, walk-up 10-by-10 tent for patients without cars. Walk-up patients will still need to schedule an appointment for testing.

Ms. Mitchell said that in other self-swab testing sites across the country, individual lanes can accommodate about 40 patients per day.

An administration window with tables will be set up for IHC staff at the Performing Arts Center, and a trailer to store testing supplies is expected as well. An on-site presence at the high school will begin Tuesday, Mr. Poole said.

The facility will be open six days a week, Monday through Saturday, with hours from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and an hour break for lunch from noon to 1 p.m. The call center will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Project leaders have also recruited a troop of volunteers — many of them retired doctors and nurses — through the Island’s medical reserve corps to staff the testing lanes and observe individuals as they perform the nasal swab in their cars. Because patients conduct the tests themselves, they must be observed by a licensed medical professional. Ms. Mitchell said that people interested in volunteering could reach out via email to the reserve corps at mvmedicalreservecorps@gmail.com.

“We’re getting a lot of inquiries from people who really want to help,” Ms. Mitchell said. “It’s a wonderful thing.”

Quest runs similar testing sites throughout the country, including in Brockton and East Boston. Island boards of health and staff at IHC have conducted webinars over the past week with those other health centers, and are meeting three times per week with Quest’s own “crackerjack” project team, as Ms. Mitchell described them last week. The details discussed range from deciding the best way to shepherd traffic at the site, to ordering printers so IHC staff can make labels for the tests.

“We’ve been able to pick the brains of Brockton neighborhood center people,” Ms. Mitchell said. “And that’s great, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

IHC is also in the process of revamping their website. Ms. Mitchell said that public health data, including the number of tests conducted and the number of positive tests, would be made available, and she hoped that the IHC website could serve as a repository for data, as well as a portal for testing information.

Ms. Mitchell, who is a West Tisbury selectman, has also formed a working group with other town officials and community members to determine what information the public needs regarding the testing site. They plan to conduct a flyer campaign, but have not worked out the details and want to wait until the call-in center is ready.

“It’s all this nuts-and-bolts stuff. And there’s just an endless list of details,” she said.

On top of all the registration, public relations and site workflow issues is a mountain of onerous, bureaucratic regulatory work that has to be done at the state level in order to get the testing site certified. But Ms. Mitchell was confident that tests would start May 28.

“It’s all of that and maybe 10 times more that has to get done,” she said.

“That doesn’t mean it can’t.”