National wants daily saliva testing at MIQ as epidemiologist slams 'extremely slow' embrace of scientific advances

National leader Judith Collins wants the Government to implement daily saliva testing at MIQ. Photo / Mark Mitchell

National is putting pressure on the Government to mandate daily saliva testing across managed isolation facilities.

Leader Judith Collins said the regularity of the daily non-invasive testing would out-weigh concerns about false negatives.

"If you have every day you're going to end up starting to pick up in the Covid-19, I would have thought. So that just seems strange to us."

The Government began rolling out voluntary saliva tests to MIQ staff last month on top of the mandated weekly tests.

A report into the management of testing for Covid-19 by Heather Simpson and Sir Brian Roche last year recommended daily saliva testing.

Yesterday Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said they had concerns about the reliability of the tests and officials wanted to create their own data from testing because international evidence was skewed by how many cases they had.

The saliva tests are being in done parallel with the regular nasal (or PSR) tests which allow the results to be calibrated in real-life.

"New Zealand's at a point where it's not good enough, really, to have a tolerance for false negatives in our environment," said Ardern at the post-Cabinet press conference on Monday.

She said the Government was "absolutely not" closed off to using saliva tests.

"There seems to be an attempt here to build a case for our opposition to saliva testing.

"There isn't one. But there's of course a view that we need to make sure we integrate it, that we've got the right capacity to do it safely, and that we're not compromising other parts of the system, and I think that's all fair."

Director general of health Ashley Bloomfield said depending on how the sample's done, it can actually be fiddlier to process than the nasal swab which was one of the factors they were considering.

"Every test, of course, does require an administrative process as well as the reagents and the testing on the machine."

But Collins said there appeared to be "some kind of reluctance" by the Health Ministry to adopt new technology.

"Whether or not its that they've already invested so heavily in other testing - but clearly this is a fast-moving scenario when it comes to science.

"We need to be picking up every piece of new science that we can and seeing how we can adopt it and adapt."

The Act Party has also called for mandatory daily saliva tests at MIQ.

This morning one of New Zealand's leading epidemiologists, Michael Baker, also recommended daily saliva testing be introduced for border workers.

Baker told TVNZ's Breakfast that the testing is easier to do daily than the nasal PCR test and would help detect cases faster.

"New Zealand started very well but I think we've been extremely slow to embrace scientific advances."

Collins said it was also time for the Government to be looking at setting up managed isolation facilities outside of Auckland.

The Government has previously ruled out establishing any more because there was nowhere else left which met the health system, infrastructure staffing and hotel requirements.

But Collins said if being in the middle of a pandemic - even beyond Covid-19 - was a long-term problem for New Zealand options outside of the biggest city should be explored.