Australia in a mess - NZ with a plan

[StartupRepair]

More than half of Australia is in lockdown now, sparked (imo) by the intransigence of the NSW Premier who ignored all warnings about Delta. Our procurement of and messaging around vaccines has been dangerously incompetent.
It all feels a bit bleak today. At least NZ seems to have a plan.

Does anyone know if the rapid antigen tests are the same as the LFTs that are regularly mentioned on Mumsnet?

@Ozgirl75

I feel similar *@bluetongue*. My family are all in the U.K. and I can’t wait to get back there for a holiday but I can’t risk having to do hotel quarantine with two children, or getting stuck somewhere. My parents are also fully vaccinated and would love to come here and will do as soon as home quarantine is introduced, but they’re 75 and every year that passes is another year older for both them and their grandchildren. DH and I have seriously considered selling up and moving back to the U.K. which neither of us really want to do as we’re very happy here normally but it just seems like such a long slog until we are free again and Australia is so happy to change the rules with little notice which makes planning life so difficult.

Hugs Ozgirl. It’s bad enough having family and friends interstate but family overseas must be terribly hard.

I don’t have an overseas passport and don’t really have skills that would get me a job overseas so I’m stuck here.

I’ve considered moving to Canberra previously but the cost of housing there makes it prohibitive as a single person.

Guess there’s worse things than being stuck in Adelaide at the moment

Rapid antigen test and LFT are the same thing. Swab your tonsils for 15 seconds then it’s a bit like a pregnancy test but the result takes 20 minutes not 2 minutes.

@newstart1234

Rapid antigen test and LFT are the same thing. Swab your tonsils for 15 seconds then it’s a bit like a pregnancy test but the result takes 20 minutes not 2 minutes.

I thought so. They are still saying they can only be done under medical supervision here in Australia. Don’t school kids do them on themselves in the UK?

I’m pretty sceptical about their usefulness because the accuracy depends a lot on the quality of the sample so I understand the logic of having supervision. OTOH I know in rl that easy access to LFTs has stopped Covid positive people Going to events that they’d otherwise have gone to. The people I’m thinking of later developed mild symptoms. It’s not technically difficult to take a sample but a negative result could be faked if people were worried about losing work for example. I’m sure high schoolers could do it, probably from age 8 or 9.

In France you go to the pharmacy to get LFTs done which seems a good compromise to me, they are really hard to do properly and I would question how many do it correctly.

Lft’s are really really easy to do. Younger kids need a bit of parental supervision but my 7 year old nephew manages fine as do my older kids.
The NHS has a video on YouTube that it recommends everyone watches which anyone could google and watch. We get a pack with 7 tests in and you can get them in pharmacies, order on line for next day delivery and schools and work places hand them out. The U.K. bought a billion of them so plenty for everyone. They can be cheated though ie. you can cheat a positive test using lemon juice or similar but as no one wants a positive test ( apart from school kids) I can’t see that’s a major problem. Anyone who gets a positive lft has to get it confirmed with a pcr test.
They are useful as they catch asymptomatic people that would otherwise not test at all and save pcr lab capacity for symptomatic people meaning those people do not have to wait hours in a queue to get tested and get their results within a day.
If you get an ambiguous result where you are not sure you can just do another test.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=S9XR8RZxKNo

Here is the NHS video for rapid test today on you tube.
Just google it and result will pop up.

Its one of those things rhat is weird and uncomfortable the first time you do it, then a bit odd the next couple of times and then you get used to it.

They're certainly used a lot here 2x a week at various times by people public facing. And then many families did before seeing older people, out of choice, or before an event. One of my child's summer activities asked for a negative lft for example before they met up.

They don't catch everycase but do catch some of the asymptomatic ones. I think they still believe a huge number of covid cases are asymptomatic.

I'm about to go and do a day of lateral flow testing in a school prior to their return today and for the rest of the week.

It will be interesting with Delta circulating so widely how many positives we get.

I did the same back in March when it was just boring old Alpha and we had been in lockdown and we only had about 7 in all and we have 3000 students so today could be fun 🤩

Good luck. Oddly lateral flow just has not been part of Australia's response.

@StartupRepair

Good luck. Oddly lateral flow just has not been part of Australia's response.

Given how they're really not that reliable, there is a lot to be said for the pcr only route tbh. We've had instances where DH or I have felt a bit dodgy, done an LFT and then although I know we can't rely on it, if LFT negative we have assumed that we are negative. But in theory you can only get PCR if you have one of the three main symptoms (which most people now don't have) or are a close contact.

Making PCRs more readily available to all is probably the way forward.

But the other side of it is that by using them for eg mass testing unsymptomatic kids or healthcare workers - obviously practically easier if results within half an hour, you will likely pick up SOME (not necessarily many) positive cases that you wouldn't know about.

I think it needs to be recognised that you can never test at the same capacity with pcr alone too. The U.K. has a very high testing rate one of the highest in the world and can manage 1 million test a day at times we don’t have the lab capacity to do that, or indeed the trained technicians so if you rely on pcr tests alone you have to test less, that may be less of an issue in a country if 25 million that one of over 60 million of course but we could never test as many as we did if we pcr all tests it just would not be practical

Back from my day of testing.

We had several positives, but not loads and loads. I had 2 personally. They seemed to tally with the sorts of numbers we are seeing in the community in terms of ratios.

I think they would have been completely useless using them in Australia when you were basically zero covid or single digits. They throw out a false positive rate of 1 in 1000 which is tiny. But just say you were still zero covid and they sent a pack out to every person in the land and say, half of the population decided to do one. It would throw out 10,000 false positive cases, causing panic.

Over here you can have a PCR test, and so can your family, if a lateral flow tests positive and with only a 1 in 1000 false rate they are damn likely to and at least you know where you are.

So if you have 100 covid positive people and each does a lateral flow, 68 will show positive according to the stats on them. So it's a useful health screening tool, because if you are asymptomatic (like the kids I tested today) but have Covid, we can tell them, and they won't turn up at College on Monday. They'll be self isolating. Their parents may well get a PCR test and end up self isolating. Their siblings might do a lateral flow and realise they have it too. Etc etc.

So they are not perfect but actually my feet are aching today from running around in full PPE but it was worthwhile, because 2 kids with Covid are at home, not out and about.

Also, they were vaccinating them today - we were encouraged to send them to the end of the hall to "have a chat" with the NHS people who had arrived who were vaccinating. So quite a good chunk of unvaccinated 16 year olds have a sore arm tonight. I was not expecting that but there you go.

That makes sense. In Australia we are encouraged to get a PCR with even the mildest of symptoms or the most fleeting exposure.

I heard the craziest Australian Covid measure yet this morning.

In Canberra they are putting QR codes to check in at playgrounds and dog parks. This is surely a step to far. They were originally for places like restaurants and shops but they are just everywhere now.

I just imagine what going anywhere here will be like once they bring in vaccine passport. You’ll need to put your mask on (got to keep those to be safe), check in with the QR cod and show someone your vaccine certificate.

In other news, the ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ movement seems to be growing. I put something on social media yesterday about how we need to open up once we get to 80% over 16s vaccinated and was called a monster and a child killer. For fucks sake, if anyone is that terrified for their child they can home school them until there are vaccines for under 12 kids. Don’t hold back everyone else.

Yes, I’ve heard people saying they won’t send children back while there’s the slightest chance they’ll get sick. Which is fine - like, it’s ok to be a massive worrier and hypochondriac, but for those of us that aren’t, we can’t keep our children home forever to appease them.

@Ozgirl75

Yes, I’ve heard people saying they won’t send children back while there’s the slightest chance they’ll get sick. Which is fine - like, it’s ok to be a massive worrier and hypochondriac, but for those of us that aren’t, we can’t keep our children home forever to appease them.

I don’t have children but remember being sick as a child. I used to be sick fairly often with viruses and the like nothing out of the ordinary, just being young and my immune system building up. I Remember feeling pretty terrible at times.

From what I’ve read on Mumsnet, most 12 and under children are less sick with Covid than I remember being from my childhood illnesses.

I agree - I had various sickness bugs (way more than my kids have ever had!), temperatures, I had the flu once, even had things like mumps and chicken pox etc. My parents never panicked about it, I just drank lucozade and recovered.
God, we even went on holiday to France when I had the mumps!

@Ozgirl75

I agree - I had various sickness bugs (way more than my kids have ever had!), temperatures, I had the flu once, even had things like mumps and chicken pox etc. My parents never panicked about it, I just drank lucozade and recovered. God, we even went on holiday to France when I had the mumps!

Gee, mumps, that’s pretty old school

I’m that old

We all got mumps, scarlet fever and measles. No major panic! Much more sickly than the majority of kids who get Covid. My DS who is a teenager with Covid had a mild fever for 24 hours and a slight sore throat. Nothing like as sick as I used to get!!!

There is some kind of hysteria happening! This is so weird. It’s like one group is - don’t kill the kids and the other is - don’t vaccinate them!!!

Oh and I got glandular fever which was super common when I was a teenager with kids off school for a couple of months with some post viral syndrome. People just cracked on !

It’s a weird thing these days that we seem to expect the government to protect us from literally every bad thing that may befall us.
I’ve said to my children, about lockdown, that sometimes life just doesn’t go the way you want it to, and you have to accept that and make the best of what you’ve got, try to look on the bright side etc. But the current mood seems to be “the government must prevent all death and disease and take any measures possible to do that”
I would like to see the daily briefings show the “top 10” causes of hospitalisations and deaths. Why do we accept that it’s just a sad part of life when a young person dies of cancer, but all deaths of Covid are unacceptable?
I’m not flippant about death, I do think it’s a tragedy when any young person dies, but I also accept that sadly these things do happen.
The other thing I read today was Labour NSW asking when we’ll have our quarantine premises ready and it’s like; why would we need a quarantine facility? Aren’t we planning to have people home quarantining or not at all by the end of the year?