People in New South Wales are facing lengthy queues at Covid-19 testing clinics ahead of the busy Christmas period.
Hundreds of thousands of people have undergone testing in the last week as cases rise across the state with 2,213 new infections on Friday.
On Thursday 127,583 people were tested, a slight dip from 143,938 the day before. But many were left waiting for long periods before getting swabbed.
Kate Evans waited for an hour and a half for a test at Warringah Aquatic Centre’s testing clinic on Thursday morning. “Fun times,” the 27-year-old said. “I got so bored I ended up Facetiming some friends from overseas, who watched me get my nose swabbed.” Despite the queue, she got a negative result about 17 hours later.
Alexandria woman Lizzie Garrett took one look at the queue for the Histopath testing clinic on Gibbons Street, Redfern, on Wednesday morning and decided to go somewhere else. “It was blocks and blocks long,” she told Guardian Australia.
The 31-year-old, who woke up with “no voice” this week ahead of a planned trip to Melbourne, went to a drive-through Laverty clinic in Rozelle instead, where she queued for about 45 minutes. “I get a lot of tests because I’m immunocompromised,” Garrett said. “I’ve seen a lot, during the spikes, during the low periods, I’ve seen what the traffic is like. I’ve never seen Rozelle this bad in all that time.”
Her result came back in a little over 36 hours. “It definitely seems like there are lots of people doing what I’m doing and going, ‘I’ve got to make sure I don’t have Covid before I travel, before Christmas, before seeing family’.”
Anecdotally, wait times have increased dramatically in a matter of days. When Nurie Salim went to the Gibbons Street clinic last week, there was a “zero minute wait”, she said. “And then they’d get you your result in two hours, no joke. Two hours.”
On Friday, she returned to find a line that already “snaked around several blocks” when the clinic opened at 9am. It moved pretty quickly, she said. “We were only waiting for an hour.”
One man was in and out of the Sydney International Airport clinic in 10 minutes on Monday, with a result back in 10 hours. But a woman who went to the same clinic on Thursday waited 45 minutes for a test and was yet to get a result at Friday lunchtime.
A NSW Health spokesperson said it “has the capacity to extend testing hours, introduce additional drive-through sites and establish extra pop-up clinics should the need arise”. NSW Health was working with private providers to ensure turnaround times were “as fast as possible”, the spokesperson added.
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People have also turned to rapid antigen tests, but they are flying off shelves faster than many places can restock them. Pharmacies across Sydney said they had zero or very few left when called by Guardian Australia. Some people struggled to find the tests in stores, while others reported they were easy to find, though costly.
Salim stressed healthcare workers should not be blamed for long queues. “They’re doing their best. It’s a hard job, people are disgruntled,” she said. “I’m not shaming the good people of the testing clinic. I just wish there could be more of them, in more places.”
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