Western Australia had no need to order rapid antigen tests because the health advice for the delta strain was for PCR testing, Premier Mark McGowan said.
“We weren’t going to go and spend $500 million on rapid antigen tests for a virus that didn’t exist,” he said.
The reasoning is similar to that used by Prime Minister Scott Morrison to explain a shortage of RATs in the rest of the country.
“The advice with delta was that you didn’t want to use rapid antigen testing because it was less accurate,” McGowan said on Friday as he revealed the state border would remain closed indefinitely.
“Obviously when omicron arrived – it didn’t exist before that – we had to reconsider [RATs] because the transmissibility rates of omicron are so much higher than delta – and that’s where rapid antigen testing comes in.”
McGowan said WA had ordered 80 million RATs at a cost of $480 million and expected 10 million to have arrived in the state early next month.
Morrison said last week that negotiations to acquire RATs reflected medical advice provided during the delta wave. “The medical advice was to prefer the PCRs.
“So that explains why the private market wouldn’t have been doing the forward orders [of RATs] that they might otherwise be doing. They had no more a crystal ball about omicron than anyone else did.
“Omicron changed everything, and it particularly changed it for Australia because this is the first time we’ve seen … the rapid escalation in cases like we’ve seen in other countries.”
On Friday, Federal Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese threw his support behind McGowan’s decision to keep the borders shut, and blamed Morrison for forcing the state to delay reopening.
“Mark McGowan has done a great job in keeping Western Australians safe, and the announcement that he has made is in direct response to the failure of the federal government to secure enough booster shots, to secure enough rapid antigen tests for the population,” he said.
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