(Image: Supplied)

Sometimes It’s the little things that hint at something bigger around the corner. A toilet leak that demolishes the floor of a house. The first inkling of a weather change that unleashes cyclonic fury. A scratchy throat that precedes Omicron.

The rapid antigen test (RAT) falls into that category: a tiny product that can accurately signal the onset of COVID in 15 minutes. And at the moment, a RAT is almost impossible to find. 

Chemists can’t provide them. Nor can supermarkets. Online suppliers are unsure when they will see more. Even hospitals are running out as hundreds of thousands of Australians follow health advice and seek a test.

And yet governments continue to tell us to pop out and pick one up, test ourselves and our families at the first sign of COVID symptoms, and then upload our results so they can track the path of this pandemic.

It’s another tiny thing: if you can’t access a RAT, how can you test yourself and upload the results? (And is the tracking of cases and places of contagion totally irrelevant without that information?)

Tiny questions. Tiny facts ignored by government. But over this pandemic they’ve grown into a huge swell of disconnection — between what our governments say (and different governments continue to say different things) and what we’re able to do.

It is that disconnection that is driving an unprecedented lack of trust in those who lead us, and the frustration we are seeing in queues and on Facebook posts where desperate families are offering everything and the kitchen sink in return for a simple test which should be accessible to all. (And that doesn’t even touch on how they should be free for all.)

Let’s just stick with the access issue, because here’s another tiny oversight that’s helping to create a bigger problem.

Early last year, the worldwide launch of a rapid antigen test occurred in Australia. (For transparency purposes, let me declare I was paid to interview the CEO and scientists about it.) The Queensland Deputy Premier and Minister for State Development, Steven Miles, was there too, lauding its development and telling a global audience that it had gained “the health and safety approvals to sell this technology in Europe and the United Kingdom’’.

The product — EuGeni — is being used in Europe, with a production arm set up in Spain to manufacture supplies. Yet this homegrown Australian technology is still not available for use in Australia.

The company behind it — AnteoTech — says it can make millions of 15-minute tests, all carrying an accuracy rate of more than 97%. No one so far disputes that. But here its use awaits approval in Therapeutic Goods Administration land. AnteoTech’s CEO Derek Thomson is careful not to antagonise that process, but you can hear the frustration in his voice.

“We could produce millions; it’s just a matter of how many millions we need,’’ he told Crikey. And he’s baffled why the government wouldn’t be chasing it.

Thomson accepts this model is slightly different — it uses a reader platform, it has a unique detection system, it’s not for use at home — but perhaps that’s the answer to many of our tiny questions. This RAT is manufactured for use by organisations — airports, businesses, hospitals, schools — to conduct ample tests quickly and provide results in 15 minutes.

Imagine how might that affect on another not-so-tiny problem we are seeing: seven-hour testing queues.
Those queues have been inevitable since day dot. The need for rapid antigen tests has been publicised for months.

Yet not one politician is picking up the phone to an Australian company that just might be able to solve the government’s problem.

Perhaps another tiny problem with this government is that they can’t see something is a problem until it whacks it in the face.

Most pundits are starting to think that might be on election day, this year.

Why is Australia seemingly reluctant to solve its rapid antigen test problem? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.