AS he surveyed the empty car park off Hillsborough Road at Warners Bay, where just a couple of weeks ago his teams were conducting hundreds of COVID tests daily at the pop-up drive-through clinic, Nick Burns uttered one tell-tale word.
"Frustrating," said Mr Burns. "Particularly when we know there's a need. It's one of 11 frustrations."
Nick Burns is a director of local pathology firm Medtech Services. In coalition with 4Cyte Pathology, Medtech Services has been operating 13 drive-through testing clinics in the Hunter.
However, 11 of those clinics have been closed since Christmas Eve, "at the worst possible time". The only two sites that have been operating are Rathmines and East Maitland.
At a time when case numbers are climbing by the thousands daily, people driving past those dormant clinics are wondering why they are not operating. But Nick Burns said it was largely because of those figures that the clinics were closed.
"The perfect storm of the circumstance of Omicron and the positivity rate instantly meant the labs couldn't process the amount of work, or the amount of tests that were in demand," Mr Burns said.
Nick Burns explained that usually labs were able to process thousands of samples a day by "pooling", where multiple specimens were combined for testing. If a "pool" returned a positive result, the individual samples were then tested. However, with the rise of Omicron, many more pools were returning positive.
"It means we're back to individual tests, which means we're at a lab capacity of about 20 to 25 per cent of what it's been in the past 18 months, two years," he said.
What's more, this came just as the Christmas break arrived, so long queues of cars were snaking out of clinics, as prospective holidaymakers got tested to satisfy state government rules. Mr Burns estimated more than half of those being tested before Christmas at the 13 Hunter clinics were wanting to travel to Queensland.
"The two things at once were just Armageddon for a couple of weeks before Christmas," he said.
What is collected at the Hunter clinics is sent to 4Cyte Pathology's laboratory in Sydney. Mr Burns said that not wanting to exceed the lab's capacity and have waiting times for results stretch out, his company made the decision just before Christmas to shut 11 of the clinics and have the other two operating on limited hours.
"We certainly don't want to be in the position of taking on more work than we can responsibly result within a reasonable period of time," he said, explaining the present turnaround time for results was about 72 hours.
"We don't want people to be frustrated."
As those queues grew, so did the level of frustration. Nick Burns said staff had copped abuse and even been spat on. However, he added that many customers were not just patient but kind to the clinics' 140 or so workers.
Mr Burns said despite reports of staff shortages over Christmas, that was not a reason for the clinic closures.
"We had an army of staff across the 13 sites, and we thought we were working," he said.
"The answer wasn't in more sites or more people; the answer was that the lab capacity was kneecapped by the circumstances."
Nick Burns said the plan was to reopen all 13 Hunter clinics, and to introduce more sites, but he didn't know when that would happen. It would depend on the laboratory's capacity increasing.
For Nick Burns and his sister, Samantha, the decision to temporarily close most of the clinics was also fuelled by a desire to take care of their community, and to honour their parents. Neville and Narelle Burns began Medtech Services at Wallsend more than 40 years ago.
"Our parents are in the back of our head, directing us at every point," he said. "So we're trying to live up to that as well."
The Warners Bay clinic is due to reopen on Tuesday from 8am as a temporary measure, because of telecommunications issues at Rathmines.
Nick Burns said an outage was impacting operations at the western Lake Macquarie facility, so services would be transferred to the Warners Bay clinic at least until the end of the week.
