Premier Dominic Perrottet has announced that it will now be mandatory for anyone who has returned a positive rapid antigen test to report their result via the Service NSW app. Anyone who has recorded a positive RAT since January 1 will have until January 19 to lodge their result. Anyone failing to report their results could face a $1,000 fine. Perrottet made clear that the call to register positive RATs was not to police infectious people but to ensure that everyone who required it was accessing the medical support they needed. Dr Kerry Chant, the state’s chief health officer, said on January 12 that 90 per cent of the state’s cases were now caused by the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
The national test strategy has shifted in recent weeks away from relying on lab-diagnosed PCR tests to self-administered rapid antigen tests, after a huge surge in demand for testing led to backlogs for results of a week or more. It is anticipated that NSW's recorded daily totals could reach as high as 100,000 positive cases a day once these self-diagnosed positive cases are logged, according to modeling by the Doherty Institute. However, severe shortages of RATs mean many people who want to test themselves have been unable to do so, so the true number of people with Covid in the community is likely to be much higher than the numbers reported by the NSW government.
While the case numbers are sobering, Chant reassured the people of NSW that many public settings were relatively low risk, including retail settings like supermarkets and shops. “We can be confident about those aspects of daily living,” she said.