People who fail to register a positive rapid antigen test result on the Service NSW app will be fined $1000, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet has said.
It comes as New South Wales has again hit a new deadliest day of the pandemic, with 21 deaths and 34,759 new cases of coronavirus overnight.
Mr Perrottet said anybody who had tested positive with a RAT since January 1 needed to log their result.
- 9 News Sydney, 12th Jan 2011
Forgive me if I have failed to understand the implications of the news.
The NSW State Government, in an attempt to open up the state for business, embarked upon a 'let it rip' strategy which everyone including Blind Freddy could have seen would result in high amounts of transmission and infection from a highly transmissible and infectious disease.
The Morrison Government in refusing to 'undercut' business, decided to let private enterprise price gouge the public and gave a heads up to businesses like Chemist Warehouse and Harvey Norman to stock up on Rapid Antigen Tests; knowing full well that private businesses would extract private profits from the public.
At the same time, other states like Queensland and Victoria demanded negative tests from the public before they allowed people to cross the borders into their states. This created massive amounts of demand from people who wanted to go travelling over the Christmas and New Years' period, thus leading to a more than tenfold increase in the number of PCR tests that needed to be done and a complete pillaging of Rapid Antigen Tests by the public; to the point where they are unavailable a lot of the time.
Premier Perrottet has now issued the directive that he intends to fine people $1000 for failing to register a positive Rapid Antigen Test result with NSW Health.
Exactly how does Mr Perrottet plan to find out who to find out who has tested positive with a Rapid Antigen Test? Surely the easiest way not to test positive is to simple not do a test. Assuming that one did test positive, you can report this fact to NSW Health and not get a $1000 fine. Assuming that one did test positive, exactly how does NSW Health to find out? Does NSW Health intend to rat through peoples' bins to find RATs?
Compare fining people for failing to report positive Rapid Antigen Tests with previous phases in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Police disproportionately fined residents of western Sydney for Covid-19 breaches during the most recent outbreak, new data shows, despite surveys suggesting its residents were among the most compliant in the state.
The state’s premier crime statistics agency has warned the high volume of fines issued to residents in Sydney’s areas of concern will pose a “significant burden for some sections of the community who are already vulnerable” and urged the government to monitor the longer-term impact of the police response.
...
Most of the breaches were dealt with by a fine, typically of $1,000, and usually involved unnecessary movement outside of a local government area (LGA) and visits to other households.
People in LGAs of concern, younger men, and those with recent involvement with police were most likely to be targeted. Roughly half the breaches – about 18,200 – involved a person who police had charged with another offence in the preceding five years.
About 13,292, or more than one-third of all breaches, occurred in the LGAs of concern.
- The Guardian, 27th Oct 2021
Perhaps you could make the argument that in that previous phase, it was about making sure that people who didn't have any protection against Covid-19 remained safe by enacting punitive measures against poorer people. Now that we've reached a sufficiently large enough proportion of the population who have been vaccinated, the risk to incurring public health expenses has in theory gone down.
This looks like an exercise in using a business model to fight a public health issue. In phase one: lock people down and then fine them for non-compliance. In phase two: unleash the virus into a vaccinated population and then fine people who get the virus? Not quite.
The intended consequences of the current policy are to stop people from using Rapid Antigen Testing, thereby making New South Wales' Covid-19 figures look bad. Even if the law is passed and the NSW Police Force could instantly hire another 100,000 officers, there would still need to be a change in the law to allow police to access private health records. That isn't going to happen.
Speaking as an amateur economist, if I were asked the best way of achieving minimal reporting of Covid-19 cases I would recommend:
1. making testing scarce and expensive
2. fining those who test positive for not reporting to the government
Does this look familiar?
The Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government (that in itself should tell you that we're not being run by a government committed to the art of public service) Victor Dominello told 2GB Radio yesterday that as at 4pm, 53,909 people have uploaded the results of a positive Rapid Antigen Test to Service NSW. Those figures are terrible. It would have been much better had they not reported. The only reason that these people are reporting a case is because they fear a $1000 fine for failing to report. From the government's perspective, that $53m in fines that could have been collected.
This policy is not about public health at all. The intended purpose of this policy is to reduce the number of reported cases. It is as simple and evil as that.
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