Anyone with a fever or acute respiratory symptoms can now be tested at any of Victoria’s 40 public screening clinics, as well as at pop-up GP clinics across the state.
WA and Queensland have also made testing available to anyone with symptoms, but only at a limited number of locations.
NSW still requires a doctor to judge a patient’s symptoms as worthy of testing.
Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos says the new testing criteria will help identify cases of community transmission, which have been rising as the number of returning overseas travellers falls.
“Now’s the right time for us to be taking a new phase of testing, and to do this more open-ended testing, really honing in and tracking down every single person, who potentially could have COVID-19,” she said.
“This will also help us to determine how we respond in terms of the (social distancing) restrictions going forward. We need to be confident that we’ve got community transmission under control before we will consider lifting those restrictions.”
Victoria extended its state of emergency for another four weeks until 11 May last week.
The Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt have also separately poured cold water on the idea of the National Cabinet relaxing lockdown measures, despite the curve seeming to be flattening in Australia.
“We can’t be complacent. We have seen what happened in Singapore most recently and Sweden and other countries,” Mr Morrison told Sunrise.
“If you take your eyes off this thing, he gets away from you so we do need to understand what the prerequisites are and the things we need to achieve before we can start to ease some of those restrictions.”
