Thousands of people are being told to get retested for Covid-19 after an overwhelmed lab system failed when the Omicron wave hit.
It's been revealed tens of thousand of people have been waiting more than five days for their Covid PCR results, not knowing if they're infected or not.
The news comes on a day where community cases clocked 19,566. 373 people are in hospital and nine of them in ICU.
As the 1pm press conference made a surprise comeback, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield confessed they'd over-estimated how many tests the lab network could actually process once Omicron took off.
And 9000 samples had to be sent to Queensland over the weekend.
Jake McKee reports.
