Back at the end of January, Birgitte McLean and her colleagues at WellSouth’s then newly opened central-city Covid-19 testing centre were having a leisurely time of it, doing a few swabs a day.
Then the Omicron wave broke with full force upon the Malcolm St facility.
"The team was doing 14-15 swabs a day up until February 10, then we did 65 and on the 11th we did 163, it built up really quickly," Ms McLean, a nurse prescriber and the site’s clinical lead, said.
"We hit 228 on the 13th to 628 on the 19th and the biggest day we had was 845 on the
21st ... I don’t know how many we each did individually, it was just full noise and all hands on deck."
On a normal day the centre has four testers on duty; that week a capacity team of 14 was hard at work.
On the centre’s busiest days, students who had taken advantage of Malcolm St’s central location and walked there were "queued for
miles" down the path and cars were backed up as far as the Chinese Garden, Ms McLean said.
"They were amazing, everyone was great," she said.
"They were really patient and very thankful, even after having to wait a couple of hours some of them, and everyone was lovely."
In its early days Malcolm St only did PCR testing, a skill which took some practice
to master.
"It’s not actually that hard when you know what you’re doing but there is an art to it," Ms McLean said.
"It needs to be horizontal, you don't want to be poking it straight up the nose ... you can’t always find where you need to go, but once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty straightforward."
There was more to the job than the simple mechanics of doing a test, Ms McLean said: there was also a pastoral care component, advising people what was happening to them and what might happen next.
"We offer a lot of reassurance, especially at the beginning, and a lot of education around what we were going to do and why we were going to do it, because people always had lots and lots of questions."
Rats and reassurance are the key jobs at Malcolm St now, but staff still perform more than 50 PCR tests a day, mainly for health staff.
The enormous numbers of people seeking tests forced southern testing centres to break open their stocks of rapid antigen tests earlier than many elsewhere in New Zealand.
That came with its own complications, though: a Rat pack given out at Malcolm St comprised two packets of tests, but the tests were shipped in packets of five.
"We had a heap of people in the WellSouth office breaking down the packs and making them up again, it was a huge effort by a lot of people who were really amazing," Ms McLean.
"We were so busy but because of that help everything was under control, everyone pulled together to make it happen."
