The day before Ashley Bloomfield admitted to Covid testing failures, there were still gaps between the Ministry of Health and ministers on exactly how many tests the country's labs would be able to handle
Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall’s office told health officials to “underplay” estimates of how many Covid-19 tests the country’s labs would be able to process as the Omicron outbreak took off, internal emails show.
The findings of an external review into how the Ministry of Health failed to accurately estimate its PCR testing capacity are due to be released within weeks, following an earlier mea culpa from Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield.
In March, Bloomfield admitted his organisation had overestimated the number of Covid-19 PCR tests the country’s laboratories could process.
At the time, Newsroom had reported on the gap between the ministry’s estimates and a system with wait times for results stretching past a week, and sought clarity on the baseline capacity.
The problems came despite Verrall announcing in late January a significant boost in the number of tests which could be processed daily, thanks in part to the installation of automated technology.
In the weeks leading up to Bloomfield's apology, the Government had repeatedly expressed confidence in the system, with Ardern saying in late February there was "overall, enough PCR capacity" and denying the Auckland testing regime had collapsed under the weight of cases. But behind the scenes, there was some trepidation about efforts to expand testing capability further.
Internal exchanges released under the Official Information Act show a ministry official had initially planned to tell Newsroom the projected capacity for unpooled testing had recently been revised upwards to over 40,000 tests a day by the end of March (up from 38,000 previously).
After a draft response was sent to ministers’ offices for feedback, just one day before the Director-General's public apology, Verrall’s press secretary expressed concern about the figures being presented and asked for the numbers to be checked with Bloomfield.
“At this point, we should be underplaying our capacity. From my conversations, I don’t think we are going to have capacity of 40k in March.”
A press secretary for Hipkins subsequently agreed, suggesting the removal of references to the increased numbers.
Bloomfield’s chief of staff said he would run the revised statement past the director-general at the same time as another memo going to him (the subject of that document was unstated, but is likely to have been about the testing network).
“That is still the worst day of my entire career - and I've worked for nearly 30 years - that Friday night when those Auckland labs went under, to have people in tears on the phone thinking that they’d let the country down.” - Terry Taylor, NZ Institute of Medical Laboratory Science
Terry Taylor, the president of the New Zealand Institute of Medical Laboratory Science, told Newsroom he and others had known at the time that the capacity estimates being shared with the public were inaccurate, with the subsequent lab failures hitting staff morale.
“They were thrown under the bus in February, and that is still the worst day of my entire career - and I've worked for nearly 30 years - that Friday night when those Auckland labs went under, to have people in tears on the phone thinking that they’d let the country down.”
Taylor said the problems identified in the ministry’s review could not be swept under the rug, and the hard work of lab workers needed to be repaid with system changes.
National Party Covid response spokesman Chris Bishop told Newsroom the correspondence showed experts like Taylor and the wider public had been right to doubt reassurances given at the time.
“It indicates the Government basically knew what many people were saying at the time, which was that they didn't have the testing capacity that the Prime Minister and other ministers were saying that they did have.”
Bishop said there had been “two years of spin” about testing numbers dating back to the start of the pandemic, while the Government had refused to use private providers like Rako Science which could have bolstered testing capacity.
While he would wait for the release of the independent review before weighing in on what changes the Government needed to make, the National Party still believed there needed to be a Royal Commission of inquiry into the Covid-19 response.
“One of the most extraordinary events in New Zealand history [over] the last two years, many billions spent on the response but also extraordinary restrictions on New Zealanders’ lives for much of that time - it's entirely appropriate that we have a Royal Commission into it, and we would expect the testing story to be part and parcel of that.”
A Ministry of Health spokesman told Newsroom it had previously acknowledged overestimating the number of tests the country’s labs could process as the Omicron outbreak took off.
“A number of factors played into this overestimation, including limits on testing caused by test reagent availability and distribution issues, a reduction in pooling of testing as positivity rates increased, and lab workforce pressures.”
Bloomfield had publicly acknowledged the error and apologised to those whose tests had been delayed.
The spokesman said the Director-General of Health had commissioned an external review of lab testing capacity and performance during the Omicron outbreak, with the results due to be released “in the next few weeks”.
In a statement, Verrall told Newsroom the email in question had been about “reporting of future capacity, not anything to do with current capacity”, and the desire not to report estimates which were higher than could be delivered.
“In this case, there were different projections of future unpooled testing capacity, and the feedback from my office was to consider using the more conservative figure.”
Verrall said she was awaiting the results of the review into the ministry’s estimates of PCR capacity.
