The country’s testing system failed last week and tens of thousands of tests haven’t been processed yet, Justin Giovannetti writes in The Bulletin.
How the PCR testing system failed. Director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield took the rare step yesterday of apologising to the 32,000 New Zealanders who have been waiting five days or more for test results. He confirmed what most people had already figured out, the country’s testing system didn’t have the laboratory capacity officials had promised. As One News reports, 9,000 delayed tests were freighted to Queensland over the weekend to help clear the backlog. The prime minister told reporters after Bloomfield’s apology that she became aware of the lagging lab capacity last week and raised concerns with the director-general about whether tests were being processed in a timely way. She admitted “errors have been made”, but took no responsibility.
What went wrong with testing? The situation was very different in late January when an upbeat Ayesha Verrall promised that “New Zealand is well prepared for omicron”. The associate health minister said the country’s labs had a baseline ability to deal with 58,000 PCR tests daily and could surge to 77,600 daily tests for a week. Instead, the wheels started coming off at around 30,000 tests a day, according to The Spinoff’s live updates. One of the main issues has been previously reported in this newsletter, that once omicron got into the community, the number of positive tests soared. That meant pooled testing had to be abandoned and each sample handled separately, slowing testing. Other issues had not been previously disclosed, including a shortage of reagents used in testing, delays installing new lab equipment and staff shortages due to vacancies and infections. The result was a move to widespread rapid testing sooner than otherwise expected.
Of yesterday’s nearly 20,000 daily cases, only 2,513 were detected by PCR. Within a few days New Zealand has become a RAT nation, with 87% of yesterday’s cases detected by take-home rapid tests. The government’s shift to phase three of the omicron plan was accompanied by an appeal to personal responsibility and New Zealanders have continued to play their part, getting tested and uploading their results in huge numbers. The team of six million is still going strong. However, people waiting on tests from last week should know that they’ll likely be less sensitive because of the delay. According to Stuff, a positive result will still be a confirmation of a case, but a negative result might be suspect.
Questions linger about why the testing ‘overestimation’ wasn’t announced sooner. Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva wrote on Twitter that the ministry of health hadn’t answered questions he put forward last week about why testing capacity was being quietly revised down, only for Bloomfield to announce it yesterday. As a reporter, that’s a frustrating outcome and poor transparency from officials. With the surge in cases and growing difficulty getting information out of the government, daily 1pm press conferences have now returned. As RNZ reports, the opposition now also wants to know why the public wasn’t told sooner. This is an area where questions in parliament and from pesky reporters have made the public health response better. Thanks for asking Sam.
The Spinoff’s Covid data tracker has the latest figures.