Victoria, QLD, NSW and WA have all widened their criteria for testing, with NSW and QLD targeting a number of ‘hotspots’ for testing and Victoria expanding testing to the over-65s, teachers, childcare workers, firefighters and emergency medical experts.
But the national guidelines still state that people without symptoms should not be tested and must show at least one of the symptoms.
The Government has argued that Australia has one of the highest testing levels in the world, and much lower rates of positive cases and deaths than other countries.
Professor Raina Macintyre (pictured), head of biosecurity at the University of NSW, has told The Australian testing in Australia was not best-practice as far as measuring community transmission levels – in part because residents of aged care facilities are not tested – even when someone else at the facility had tested positive – unless they showed symptoms.
NSW Health only tested the remaining 67 residents at BaptistCare’s Dorothy Henderson Lodge on 20 March – over two weeks after the first case of an infected staff member was diagnosed on 4 March.
Does the Government need to expand this to ‘fill in’ this gap then?
