Geelong residents now have greater access to rapid antigen tests when needed, with Barwon Health now providing the tests at its testing sites.
The state government received the first three million of the 44 million tests it ordered over the weekend, which have now been distributed across the state.
Barwon Health spokesperson Kate Bibby said there were now RATs available at the health service’s Norlane and Torquay testing sites.
“Barwon Health North and the Torquay Testing sites are offering both PCR and RAT tests for household or household-like contacts of confirmed cases and people with COVID symptoms, as well as other contacts in high-risk groups,” she said.
“It is important to note that if you have a positive RAT it is not necessary to have a PCR test.”
Access to RATs as well as the return of some of Geelong’s private PCR testing sites has seen smaller testing lines this week.
“Turnaround times for PCRs are expected to improve but in some cases are up to between five and seven days,” Ms Bibby said.
Greater Geelong recorded 441 new cases of COVID-19 today, taking the active case total 4261, while 39 new cases were recorded in the Surf Coast Shire.
Barwon Health chief executive Frances Diver said there were around 13,000 active cases in the area the health service managed, which included the south-west of the state.
“We do have over 13,000 active cases across the whole region. That means we’re getting about 1500 to 2000 new notifications every day,” she said.
“We know that’s a significant underestimate because people have been unable to get tests in the community.
“But the 13,000 is not really the important number. The important number is the number of people we have in hospital.
“At the moment, across the region, we have just over 60 people who are in hospital – most of them are here in University Hospital Geelong, fortunately not many of them are in ICU.”
Ms Diver said Barwon Health was about to open a third dedicated COVID ward at University Hospital Geelong to manage increased hospitalisations.
“I can assure the community that we have plans in place – as the number of people who need hospitalisation [increases], we’re able to create more capacity here to accommodate those patients,” she said.
“Of course this comes at a cost and we’ve had to scale back some of our non-urgent work and non-urgent elective surgery … we hope this is only for a short period of time while we’re going through this real peak in cases that are coming to the hospital.”
To help hospitals coped the state government announced today it had implemented a pandemic code brown at all major hospitals, including Barwon Health.
The code brown will allow hospitals to configure services to free up more staff, including the delivery of outpatient services outside the hospital, and the rapid offload of ambulance patients at emergency departments to get paramedics back on the road as soon as possible.
Hospitals may also choose to redeploy staff to work in areas of highest clinical priority.
“Our hardworking health workers on the front-line are caring for record numbers of coronavirus patients every day – this is the best way to ensure our hospitals can continue to safely care for those that need it most,” acting health minister James Merlino said.
“Our health services will have to make some hard decisions over the next few weeks to manage increasing demand and I thank every single one of them for making the tough calls necessary to help as many Victorians as they can.”
The pandemic code brown is expected to last four to six weeks.
