P-platers line up to get Covid tests after Brisbane nightclubs flagged as exposure sites

Pathology clinics have issued a desperate plea for staff as the Omicron outbreak and influx of interstate visitors causes mayhem at Brisbane Covid testing sites.

Pathology clinics have issued a desperate plea for staff as the escalating Omicron outbreak and a surge in interstate arrivals triggers a mad scramble for Covid testing.

Cars stretched more than a kilometre and wait times blew out to more than two hours at a drive-through Covid testing clinic on Brisbane’s northside this morning.

Patrons lined up from dawn to receive their PCR test at QML Pathology Ashgrove Baptist Church.

A traffic controller said lines started to form from 5.30am despite the clinic’s 7am opening time. Some of the first to arrive only left just after 8am.

Freya Martin, 18, in the testing line at Ashgrove. Picture: John Gass

Due to unprecedented demand, QML Pathology has put a call-out on social media for urgent help at the Murarrie testing centre.

“I’m looking to recruit some staff … Immediate start (even today if possible) they are under pressure down there,” a recent post said.

The government’s Pathology Queensland is also in the middle of a staff recruitment drive to cope with extra testing. Their aim is to employ 78 new staff members for their 36 laboratories.

Drivers waited more than two hours to get a Covid test at the Ashgrove Baptist Church Car Park site on Thursday. Picture: John Gass

Young people dominated the line in Ashgrove, after several nightspots were added to the exposure site list.

Mia Shapland said she discovered she was a casual contact after spending her first night out at Birdee’s in Fortitude Valley after recently turning 18.

“It was my very first time in a nightclub,” she said.

“I can’t believe it.”

Mia Shapland in the testing line after learning she was one of the Birdees nightclub casual contacts. Picture: John Gass

Freya Martin, also 18, said that she too was at Birdees and deemed a casual contact.

“Pretty much every P-plater in this line was at Birdees.”

“I know them all.”

Meanwhile, the Gold Coast’s Covid outbreak has grown with four more cases emerging from a Surfers Paradise resort.

The four tourists, all aged in their 20s, were taken to Gold Coast University Hospital on Thursday afternoon after testing positive to Covid at Bunk Surfers Paradise.

It was not immediately known which strain of the virus they had contracted, but it swells the number of positive cases on the Gold Coast to almost 25.

The tourists will spend Christmas in isolation with contact tracers now scrambling to establish how many people they may have come into close contact with since arriving on the Gold Coast.