HUNTER residents are waiting in long queues of more than an hour for testing at COVID-19 clinics.
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A Newcastle teacher told the Newcastle Herald at 10.30am they had been in the line for the Laverty Pathology drive-through testing clinic at Adamstown for about 90 minutes and had travelled just 120 metres.
"I'm not very close to getting there, there are cars everywhere, there are people trying to jump the queue, it's absolutely insane," the teacher said, from his car in Date Street.
"I'm running parallel to the main road and there's a person I can see ahead in a green vest, she's directing a bit of traffic, because you've got a line up of cars in Date Street heading south, a line I can see heading north, which goes back as far as the eye can see, and then they're letting cars in on my right which must have come from another direction.
"So they're trying to give us turns to go into Victoria Street to go to the testing.
"The problem is it's moving so slowly I've literally taken an hour and a half to go around 120 metres."
He left the clinic after being tested at 11.30am, two and a half hours after he joined the queue.
"The way it was set up was pretty good, it's just that they're getting inundated."
He said despite the wait, it was important to do the right thing and get tested.
"Bottom line is it's better to be safe than sorry," he said.
"I thought it was a judicious move to get tested rather than blow it off.
"I see 150 different kids a day at a minimum at an enclosed space, for their sake I don't want to infect them if I've got it and for my sake I don't want to catch it off them if they've got it."
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The teacher - who has had his first Pfizer vaccination and woke up this morning with a sore throat and blocked nose - said his experience at Adamstown followed more than an hour in the queue for the NSW Health testing clinic at the University of Newcastle.
The clinic opened at 7.30am and the Newcastle Herald photographed people being tested between 7am and 8am.
The teacher said he joined the queue for the clinic at 7.45am but wasn't able to reach the testing area.
"I got into a loop turning into the university, turning left, and it ended up you went on a loop up to a roundabout and back out to go back in again," he said.
"There was a left turn to go in [to the testing area] and it was closed off, so we went past it and what I found was we were going to the next roundabout, looping around, going back out of the uni and then trying to get back in, so people thought we were pushing in, but we'd actually been there longer than them."
A NSW Health Pathology spokesperson said the clinic opened at 7.30am, but staff sometimes needed to put traffic control measures in place and a temporary hold on people joining the queue, as part of a safety precaution to ensure roads surrounding the clinic weren't blocked.
They said in these cases, people were asked to return at a later time when they are able to join the queue.
NSW Health Pathology said in a statement on Wednesday that its John Hunter laboratory - which conducts COVID-19 testing for the University of Newcastle clinic and public hospitals in the Newcastle area - was currently testing with a median turnaround time of 21.63 hours, with 90 percent of patients receiving their results within 29.35 hours.
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