A top cheese company is relying on rapid antigen tests (RATs) to keep it going as New Zealand heads into phase two of the Omicron response.
Whitestone Cheese has sourced the rapid antigen tests itself and is waiting to be confirmed as a critical business.
Under the test to work scheme, critical staff who are close contacts of cases can bypass isolation as long as they return a daily negative RAT test.
The aim is to keep food production and critical infrastructure operating as Omicron spreads.
But for Whitestone it has been a maze of rules and an expense to get this far.
The company's managing director, Simon Berry, told Checkpoint they have spent $8000 on RATs from a New Zealand supplier and they were yet to receive their full order.
"We've received about a third of them, and we still don't have enough if we're going to impose on daily testing, we're not going to have many to last us at all, and they're costing a pretty penny. We bought them privately and now we're waiting on government advice on when we can be supplied some."
The business was keeping a step ahead of the government's advice by also testing any staff who enter potential exposure events, like big weddings, before they return to work, Berry said.
They had also spent $12,000 for a 12-month contract on an internal tracing system to monitor who is a potential contact.
"It's a lanyard system and it records how long each lanyard has been talking to each other throughout the day. So if one member gets [Covid], within minutes we can run a report and say 'right, you've had 15 minutes with this staff member, you've got eight close contacts, you've got 12 that are secondary contacts'."
Berry said he had heard of other businesses spending between $80,000 to $100,000 in preparation for the spread of Omicron.
He said they were investing to protect job security and prevent a shut down of production was shut down if they had a Covid-19 case.
"So we've got micro bubbles and with this [tracing] system it's not about proving who's with you, it's actually proving who wasn't with you.
"We're fighting all these regulations and restrictions to keep operating, to keep job security going."
Despite the country moving to phase two of the Omicron response at midnight, they still had not heard about when they were getting their RAT supply from the government, he said.
"So we've created this [process] ourselves ... we've got a great board that's mitigating the risk with us.
"We've really put our brains together because it's a real challenge.
"It's just decimating and it's so hard for businesses to figure this out when the rules are constantly changing, we're just tired of all these changes and restrictions. If it was simple - if it was like just RAT tests, clear, come to work, that'd be great, but it's not, we've got all these minefields to work through."
The restrictions were letting them down, he said, and while they wanted to do their best for the Covid-19 response, the balance between that and the cost to business was "out of skew".
