NSW Health has asked all health care workers, aged care workers or workers in other high risk or residential care settings with symptoms to come forward immediately for testing, and to make sure that their occupational status is noted so that their test can be prioritised following yesterday’s news that NSW will soon start testing anyone.
The Chief Medical Officer, Professor Brendan Murphy, also announced yesterday that testing would be extended across the country to ensure any cases of community transmission are picked up.
“Anybody with acute respiratory symptoms – cough, sore throat, runny nose, cold symptoms, flu-like symptoms – can get tested,” he said.
“This will significantly expand the population of people tested. We’re pretty confident that most of them will be negative, but this will give us a really broad reach of what we call passive surveillance. But we’re also looking at a range of active surveillance mechanisms to test even people without symptoms in a range of front-line occupations and a range of what we call sentinel situations, where we sample the population.”
“National Cabinet is very clear that they want to be absolutely confident before relaxing any measures that we are in a position in this country to detect any community transmission of any significance.”
Up to 8,000 people a day are now being tested in NSW, while Victoria has been performing between 3,000 and 4,000 tests a day.
The news means the Government has ticked off one of its criteria for relaxing lockdown measures – how long now until they begin to ease restrictions?
