A seemingly easy question that trips people up all the time is ”Do I need a COVID test?“ This is what we will try to answer succinctly in this blog post. With Dan Andrews letting Victorians know we will have even more freedoms coming up on June the 1st, it’s a really good time to think about how we should be behaving to minimse the impact of COVID on our lives and try and avoid a second wave of infections. There are lots of pieces to the puzzle being laid out in terms of COVID and the picture is looking promising for Australians in general, because of the excellent team effort we put in as a nation to abide by the strict lockdown laws. The testing blitz that we did here in Victoria led to well over the 150,000 tests we aimed to achieve in the last few weeks and this translates to usable data for our little slice of the world. COVID is tricky for lots of reasons. It’s a completely new strain that we’ve never dealt with and the vast majority of people being infected have very mild symptoms. This sounds awesome, and on one hand it is. It means most people infected with covid will be ok. On the other hand if you have a disease which hospitalises around 10-20% of people infected depending on which studies you are looking at that is also easy to transmit because the carrier doesn’t feel sick then this is a bit of a problem. It means you might feel like you have a garden variety common cold like you do most years around this time of year and think nothing of it (I cant possibly have COVID - I'm not crook!) but in fact be exposing your vulnerable loved ones and community members to COVID and just because you werent that sick doesn’t mean they will be fine too. Moz stop going on a tangent - what does this have to do with me getting a covid test? The reason the restrictions are loosening up is because we are confident due to the volume of testing we've been doing that our community transmission rate is low. We are about to test the waters and let loose with allowing people to socialise a bit more freely in the coming weeks and IF this leads to a spike in COVID numbers it may mean that we end up in a similar severe lockdown like we had at the start of the pandemic. In order to minimse the risk of this happening it is important that if you have ANYTHING that vaguely resembles a runny nose, sore throat, bit of sinus congestion, mild cough - you go get tested. It will be a minor inconvenience. A small cotton bud stuck into the back of your throat and both nostrils - and you will probbably need to stay at home for a few days while the result comes back but it means if we have a second wave we
will hopefully be able to see it coming before the numbers rise too drastically. This means we are swabbing every man, woman and child with any of these symptoms. So please if you are even the vaguest bit sick 2020 is not like any other yea
r we have ever had and I hope you will at least talk to your doctor about the need for covid testing. You can still get tested at the department of health funded sites - our closest one is the Austin, there are a number of pop up respiratory clinics in Melbourne and of course we do them here at The Local Doctor if needed. If you arent sure and you are getting conflicted advice just call the department of health corona virus hotline 1800 675 398 or if you have questions that are more medical in nature book in an appointment.
If you have a question you want answered about this topic or any other topic drop a comment below or hit me on my social media links or email ask@drmoz.com.au
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