Police and protesters clash in late-night drama, prepping for a move to phase 3 and stand-off continues between Ukraine and Russia in the latest New Zealand Herald headlines. Video / NZ Herald
A school leader says schools are unnecessarily being forced to close and students sent back to home learning because schools are excluded from the official list of RAT exemptions.
It comes as New Zealand's Covid-19 positive test rate soars to more than double the World Health Organisation's benchmark for a widespread outbreak - with fears many more cases of Omicron are going undiagnosed amid growing pressure on testing facilities.
Yesterday there were 3297 community cases - another daily record - and 179 in hospital, including one person in intensive care.
Speaking to Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking, Auckland Secondary Principals Association President Steve Hargreaves said they were "very frustrated".
"We've got schools closing, rostering students home, sending year levels home and it doesn't need to be this way.
"If we had RATs available and we were properly part of this close contact exemption scheme then we'd have these schools still open for the most part."
He said the Government had been told that RATs weren't accurate enough, with fears teachers would be putting students at risk if they got a false negative and came back into the class.
And "yet they're now the only method of testing in Auckland," he said.
Hargreaves said his school had been approached almost on a daily basis by providers of RATS to buy them, and most schools would be happy to pay a little bit for a supply of RATs.
"A relieving teacher is about $300 a day and a RAT is about $13 a day so it adds up."
He said his school had a supply of approved rapid antigen tests on hand which the school had been used for surveillance purposes already.
Hargreaves said education officials were in a "jam", needing to follow "the party line".
"I think they would dearly love to be giving us RATs but because of the people that work in front of them they haven't ordered them. That's the frustration."
There were now school leaders suggesting Omicron is allowed to rip through schools and get it out of the side,
"There's a lot of people thinking like that and I do lean that way. This announcement this afternoon is going to be interesting because if this phase 3 gets us in that direction then I think that will be really good for us."
Otago University epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker says shift to using RATs as the primary test at Auckland community testing sites is a necessary move. Photo / Supplied
In the wake of soaring Omicron cases, Health Minister Andrew Little says in the two years of Covid in the community there had not been a single case of staff infecting patients in hospitals.
Little told Three's AM breakfast show New Zealand had one of the best track records in the world in terms of keeping patients and health staff safe during the pandemic.
Asked about the prospect of asymptomatic nurses who test positive likely to be required to work on wards as the the Omicron outbreak surges to new heights, Little said he was unsure about the scenario.
However, he said there were protocols for DHBs to manage their workforce and to date there had been no cases of staff-to-patient infection.
"They've got protocols to deal with that, not only to keep the patients safe but to keep staff safe as well," he said.
"[When] you look at the last two years of Covid in this country and what has happened in our hospitals, there has not been staff-to-patient transmission of Covid in all the time we've been doing that."
"The reality is in spite of what some representative organisations are saying the DHBs have managed Covid, particularly those Auckland ones because they've been at the epicentre of this."
He rejected claims that GPs and community health care workers had been neglected and were at crisis point, saying they had in fact been "integral" in the planning and preparation for the response.
Little said the RAT tests that were approved for sale and use in New Zealand had been checked for their accuracy which was around 80 per cent mark.
"You want to make sure the best RAT tests are available because even with that level of accuracy it still poses challenges."
"You want to get the best RAT kits available and they're the ones that will be available in New Zealand."
Meanwhile, two car crashes this morning near a major west Auckland testing site saw people asked to stay away until the accidents had been cleared.
Te Whanau O Waipareira said there had been two separate car accidents near the Henderson testing centre.
Posting on social media it said all emergency services were at both scenes and asked people to not come to the testing centre until the situation had changed.
#Incident‼️‼️‼️ Kia Ora Whānau there have been two separate car accidents near our Covid Testing centre. The Police, Fire Engines and Ambulances are here.
PLEASE DO NOT COME To Our Testing centre for Now. We will advise when the area is cleared. pic.twitter.com/SkrOpakCbu
Auckland remained host to the largest number of new infections announced yesterday – 1729 – but numbers exceeding 100 have also been recorded in Waikato (297), Bay of Plenty (157), Capital and Coast (123), Canterbury (176) and the Southern region (455).
New Zealand's positivity rate - the percentage of tests that are positive – is 12.2 per cent, meaning more than 12 out of every 100 Kiwis tested in the past 24 hours have returned a positive result.
In New South Wales, the positivity rate climbed from 3.42 per cent on Christmas Eve to a peak of 38.57 per cent on January 8 before tracking back down to 9.09 per cent yesterday.
The Australian state currently has more than 100,000 active Covid-19 cases.
University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker said New Zealand's positivity rate passed five per cent for the first time last week - the level the World Health Organisation says indicates a country had a widespread outbreak.
An increasing positivity rate was also a sign that a lot of infections were being missed in the community, Baker said.
"It means your denominator of testing is probably not big enough, you're not casting the net wide enough to find all the cases you need to find to take action to dampen down transmission."
Amid the growing cases, New Zealand's shift to phase 3 of the Omicron response plan could happen as early as today.
Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson and director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield will today "announce the next steps in the response to the Omicron outbreak".
Robertson has previously said a move to phase 3 - where fewer people would be required to self-isolate if they came into contact with a confirmed case and people would be required to self-report infections rather than relying on PCR testing - was close.
As demand mounts on Auckland's Covid-19 testing capacity, health officials deployed the use of rapid antigen tests (RATs) as the primary test used across the city's community testing centres.
RATs, generally taken with a front of nose swab, were rolled out at community testing centres in Waikato, Bay of Plenty and Southern regions on Tuesday to be used along with PCR tests.
Baker said the move to use RATs as the primary test in Auckland was "necessary" amid increasing pressures at the city's community testing site.
"There's probably no system in the world that can cope with very intense, huge increase in cases with the PCR technology we have," Baker said.
"As good as it is, and the fact it's been hugely automated, it has its limits in capacity and when they are exceeded you do need some other way of testing people and that's where RATs come in."
Beyond community testing centres, RATs are also used in a number of other situations, including the Close Contact Exemption Scheme for critical workers and by organisations who work directly with Covid-19 cases and contacts, such as emergency services like police and Fire and Emergency NZ.
Education bosses have also confirmed the introduction of RATs for teachers is among new rules for schools in a bid to keep pupils in class.
The quick tests can only be used when schools are at risk of having no staff member available to supervise students who have to attend school in person, such as children of essential workers.
Rapid antigen tests have been introduced as the primary test to be used at Auckland community testing sites amid high demand. Photo / Michael Craig
Meanwhile, community testing centres aren't the only facilities feeling the heat of high testing demand.
Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners president Dr Samantha Murton says one pressure GP clinics were facing was around testing – including administering tests and answering questions over the phone about the process.
This was on top of other Covid-19 related duties, from managing cases and checking in with vulnerable patients – as well as their business-as-usual tasks.
"We recognise that it is our gig, that we are going to have to face what we have to face," Murton said.
The National Party yesterday launched a petition calling for RATs to be sold in pharmacies and supermarkets, saying the tests were available at these sites in "almost every other developed country, but not in New Zealand".
National's Covid-19 response spokesman Chris Bishop said it was not good enough testing centres were being overwhelmed with people that were waiting in queues for hours and then days to get their results.
The Ministry of Health said there were 6.9 million RATs in the country and another 14.7m were expected by the end of the month - enough to help New Zealand through a widespread Omicron outbreak in the coming months.
Yesterday's community cases were across Northland (40), Auckland (1729), Waikato (297), Bay of Plenty (157), Lakes (54), Hawke's Bay (18), MidCentral (56), Whanganui (5), Taranaki (30), Tairāwhiti (16), Wairarapa (16), Capital and Coast (123), Hutt Valley (28), Nelson Marlborough (85), Canterbury (176), South Canterbury (7), Southern (455) and West Coast (3) regions.
