Why wait times for PCR results have blown out in Victoria

Victoria’s COVID-19 commander has admitted many people are now enduring lengthy waits to receive their PCR test results.

Speaking at today’s COVID-19 press conference, Jeroen Weimar said Victorian labs have had to change their procedures due to a surge in the number of positive cases.

Yesterday, one-in-five PCR tests across the state returned a positive result.

“When we were running at lower levels of positivity we’d pull all of our samples together, batch them up and run them through the labs and only where we then find a positive rate in a group of tests retest that subset to work out which cases were positive,” Mr Weimar said.

“Because of the very high rate of positivity we’re now seeing in all of out tests, every single test is processed individually … that means that it takes us longer to process individual test results. That means we’re starting to see longer turnaround times.”

Victoria has historically had nine out of 10 results come back the day after testing, but Mr Weimar says only a third of results are now being received the day after testing, and just half of test results are coming back within two days.

Press PLAY below to hear more about the blow out in wait times for PCR results