Victoria’s COVID commander Jeroen Weimar says one in five PCR tests in the state is coming back with a positive result, which is not very live, laugh, love of them, honestly.
Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Weimar said that Victoria has seen a tenfold increase in positive results in the last few weeks and more cases in the first few days of 2022 than all of 2020, according to ABC reporter Dannielle Maguire on its liveblog.
Today, the state recorded 8,577 cases and facilitated 44,168 tests. There are currently 38,118 active cases in the state, which Weimer says are “numbers we’ve never seen before”. Cool, cool, cool.
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While the Victorian Deparment of Health is currently seeing a lower rate of hospitalisation with the Omicron variant, hospitals are also expecting an increase in admissions in the coming weeks considering the variant’s higher rate of positivity.
Honestly, given our social media feeds have been nothing but photos of rapid antigen test results or screenshots of text messages from Victoria Health, this isn’t all that surprising. But, God, does it still suck to read from a legit health official.
Weimar also explained why your test results have been delayed lately. It’s basically due to the “very high rate of positivity in samples right now and the fact that samples used to be examined collectively but are now being processed individually across all testing facilities.
“That means it takes us longer to process individual test results,” he said.
“We usually have a hallmark of nine out of 10 tests coming back by the next day. We’re now seeing a third of our test results coming back by the next day.”
While these huge numbers are scary, studies have shown that Omicron is less likely to fuck up your lungs than other COVID variants. So, hopefully that means the virus is more manageable at home and we don’t see too many more hospital admissions.
