COVID Testing Best Left to Private Enterprise

As we get used to living with widespread Covid, microbiologiest Siouxsie Wiles is calling for a new way to track how much of the virus is in the community and what variants.

She says in the UK they regularly test a representative sample of people, which more effectively monitors the virus. Should we introduce this instead of the current long queues for rapid antigen tests?

Stuff

The below article is Stuart Smith’s response to the above question that was posed to him by Stuff.

To put it mildly, the likes of Siouxsie Wiles and other modellers have been grossly inaccurate in their attempts to model Covid-19 infections in New Zealand.

They told us that we would have 50,000 cases per day by Waitangi Day weekend, so we can be forgiven for treating Ms. Wiles suggestions with a healthy level of scepticism.

It’s not just me saying that either, the Minister for Covid-19 Response said himself that modellers’ predictions were equivalent to weather forecasts and that he was “sceptical”. Actually, I think the Minister is being very unkind to weather forecasters as they are much more reliable.

If we are to be charitable we could say that New Zealand’s response to Omicron has been average, and the responsibility for this lies with the Government, who are forever blaming others for their mistakes.

The Ministry of Health are behind the eight ball and have been for some time now. Finally, they admitted, what those who have been waiting over five days for their Covid PCR test result already knew, the Ministry of Health cannot process tests fast enough.

The claim that they could process 58,000 tests per day was frankly farcical, they have let us down when we really needed them.

What the Minister needs to understand and admit, is that he does not have all the answers, and neither does his inner circle of modellers or the Ministry.

The fact of the matter is, Rako Science is already doing what Ms. Wiles has suggested and they collected more than 20,000 saliva samples across an eight-day period last week, with the majority of those samples being from asymptomatic individuals.

The Minister would do well to learn from Rako Science, who not only have a more efficient testing protocol, their saliva test is much more user friendly and less invasive than the old school approach that the Ministry use.

So what is suggested, is already being done by a private company, filled with experts who genuinely understand epidemiology and testing. Perhaps a better approach would be to use Rako Science’s data, and if necessary ask them to expand their testing. Why reinvent the wheel by asking the Ministry to duplicate the process?

The facts are quite clear. The Government has over promised and under delivered when it comes to testing capacity, this is too important to wait for them to learn on the job.

There is no shame in admitting you don’t have the capability and contracting others to do the work alongside you, but there is shame in not admitting that you don’t have all the answers, and then coming up well short of the mark when it is too late. Swallow your pride Minister, we deserve better.