Looks like it's back in stock
Testsealabs COVID-19 Rapid Antigen Test Cassette Nasal 20 Count $154.99 Delivered @ Costco (Membership Required)
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With any luck these won't be posted as deals anymore soon :)
HN will have to come up with new ways to rip people off.
Don't worry, they will.
probably gonna start creating their own viruses. They're already a bunch of parasites!
This is the price I paid on the 17th.
If you mean relative to this https://www.costco.com.au/Health-Beauty/Health-Medicines/Cou… it's a different brand
Stupid alerts from Costco didnt work. Glad OP posted this, I didnt want to buy from anyone profiteering.
1 million school kids in Victoria just got given a five pack for free. I doubt these will be expensive for much longer
NSW soon too! Prices about to crash!
Im surprised people spend hundreds on these tests. Genuine question: Is someone compensating you? Does your work require it, and how can you afford these tests?
We usually test before meeting friends who are immunocompromised or meeting grandparents.
Some people need them to return to work or be able to go out if a close contact. Not all workplaces will pay, in fact, most are not.
For me, it’s about how much my time is worth. If I can save 1 or 2 hours going to get a pcr test then wait 24 hours for the result, it’s money well spent.
Literally the amount of fuel I will burn driving and waiting there, might as well just pay $8 for it.
Hmmm….. I've recently gone for a PCR test, and there was practically nobody. Government has pretty much moved all the lines of PCR to Pharmacies and Chemists when they announced they will accept RAT test results.
My grandfather is in aged care and the aged care facility requires a negative RAT per visit.
They currently do not have enough stock so have asked visitors to provide their own if they want to visit.As a business owner, we need many of these to keep our staff working, the doors open and the bills paid. Yet another cost to bear, while revenues suffer.
Yep, same. They are the only reason we stayed open during summer. Bloody expensive when testing daily, but there was no other options to keep the doors open and casual staff employed.
You realise some people run businesses and buy these for their employees yeah?
Yeah I do realise that. Do you realise that?
I am a cancer survivor with severely damaged lungs from chemo.
I politely ask my home guests to take a test before I take my respirator off.
As they are all my friends and know about my condition they see no problem with it, and I see no problem providing them with the test kit.
I would even be careful then, my whole family has COVID at the moment (confirmed by PCR) and only two of us are showing positive on RATs
False positives on RATs are ridiculous. I don't even know why they are legal. If you are sick stay home.
My sister is immunocompromised after chemo and barely surviving a stem cell transplant. Her lung function is still pretty poor, and her daughter is about to go back to school. Her friends are already isolating due to close contacts and infections. You know what? I'll pay $15 a test so that she can use them whenever she needs to to feel safe. It probably won't help, she'll probably end up catching it at some point in the next month or two, but if I'd looked at those tests and said "Nah, you know what, they're not worth more than $8 each", I'd be a bit of a selfish prick, wouldn't I?
From my knowledge these are questionably ineffective. My mate was told his kid’s childcare was exposure site and his kid was close contact. They tested with rapid kits, all negative. Couple days later developed symptoms and did a PCR and sure enough it was positive. They immediately did rapid test and they were all negative again. 🤦♂️
I saw in a different website that rats are not affective against omicron variant 🤷♂️.I’m not wasting money on any of these anymore, if I develop systems I’ll get tested through pcr and take necessary steps.
This is probably true. Alot of the accuracy and sensitivity surrounding these RATs that have TGA Approval were done on earlier strains.
That said, there are a few on the market that I believe have been explicitly and independently tested against Omicron. The 'Son' of omicron is a whole new ballgame, who knows whats happening with that.
I just spent part of my day handing out packs of 5 to families at the school i work at Today, the majority of families of primary school kids received a pack of 5 tests.
Surely this will take the pressure off and hopefully reduce costs a bit.
How about kinder/highschool etc?
Not sure. High school is vaccinated and for kinder you can receive free RATS from PCR sites as Education contacts in Victoria if cases occur in your childs rooms. Saliva based tests for younger people. I haven't accessed though and I have no idea of the real world availability.
Here are a few reasons:
- Speed of result
- Not having to to wait in a line
- Ability to take the test at a time that suits.I honestly don't trust RATs at all now, I have COVID currently and tried multiple brands of RATs because I thought I had it, and they all turned up negative, it wasn't until I was bedridden and had a high fever until a faint line showed up on a RAT test. meanwhile the rest of my family were all reporting negative on RATs, a PCR confirmed we all had it, but the RATs were only showing positive for people who had the most severe symptoms.
The problem with PCR tests is they can take up to 10 days to get the result back in VIC.
There have been times when they don't turn up at all.10 days?? My results have always come back in 2 days
You've been very lucky then.
Mine took 6 days, brother-in-law's took 8 days and a friend's took 10 days. Very frustrating particularly when you get a negative result and you've isolated for nothing.It was in the media not long ago that PCR tests were taking more than a week to get a result so they closed down smaller testing sites so they could catch up on the backlog.
Almost 100,000 tests were discarded at one point after test labs were left overwhelmed by unprecedented demand.
@Bone: There was only like 1 incident and that was over Christmas when there was a sudden influx of PCR tests (because people wanted to go party or fly interstate) and when Omicron was ATH.
I always go to the privately run ones by 4cyte which usually is like a 8hr turn around. If I test by midday, they will have emailed me results by 5am next morning.
I gave up on doing RAT test, I pretty much knew I had it, I was even symptomatic and did 3 rat tests and all came back negative, so I went and got a PCR test on day 4 of being symptomatic, and yup….. tested positive. People need to use these with a grain of salt and dont put too much faith in them.
Key learning for me is that even if you are negative, if you don't feel well then simply assume you have COVID and stay at home. Throughout my entire ordeal, I only had a light sore throat (the cold I had last September was 10x worse), if I simply dismissed that as being nothing, I would have spread COVID to everyone around me.
I'd wait another two weeks, and watch a pack of 20 go for $69
Sounds like house price predictions during COVID
Still not enough supply to drive the prices way down, in fact, this article on the ABC website today said wholesale prices are rising due to the lack of supply from the government backed programs soaking up supply and prices up to $15 wholesale now. Tl;dr this is a great price right now.
RATs selling for as much as $15 wholesale as retailers struggle to keep costs down:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-31/rapid-antigen-tests-s…Is anything at the pharmacist ever cheap?
It is like when I worked for a casino. They'd get the same TV at twice retail price because even if you can buy 600 TVs at JB HiFi who is going to cart it on site, unload, get it into rooms and mount it? The same contractors will draw their bags of blood because they all submit higher quotes because you will pay someone so why not go fishing because money is basically free.
In this case what price you put on your health.
Pharmacist / Pharmacy industry is just as shrewed as medical association restricting supply of doctors and surgeons to artificially keep it to Australian graduates only.
A bit like enterprise IT too. Suppliers charging eye watering prices for basic laptops, keyboards, mice and monitors and the big corps just swallow it because the $$$ means a lot less to them than the average individual consumer…
Even worse we pay to give away old hardware that has great resale value.
@811b11e8: Which then ends up getting resold on eBay by places like Technology Locker for premium prices! It's crazy. I've been to two of the bigger e-waste recycling plants in Melbourne (one in Moorabbin and the other in Campbellfield), was truly astounding to see piles of relatively recent laptops and SFF desktops just sitting there to be picked apart and recycled.
My kids both got a box today (test twice a week) and my wife got one last week (Special Ed teacher, test 5 times a week). Wonder how they;ll keep up with mandates…
One of the more lousy in the market though.
Not really. There are three levels (very high, high and acceptable) and this is high.
https://www.gps-can.com.au/covid19-blog/rapid-antigen-test-c…
Not sure if this is statewide or not, but our local PCR testing sites have now moved to 100% RATs, and aren't providing PCR tests at all.
I love Costco but any of you guys who have friends that have had covid in other countries will know that we are going to get it sooner or later. Save money don't buy this. Do what you can to stay healthy before we get it. Had the cold or flu before? If you answered yes then you are probably going to catch this thing
Tell this to your anti-vaxxer friends who died from COVID…
I don't think he meant it in this way, I read it as if it will just become more common.
Oh right… lol my apologies.
But… he's not wrong, the way things are going. Sooner or later we are going to get it sooner rather than later.
Still, we must do wherever we can to prevent transmission.
I'm vaxxed and I think everyone should get vaxxed, however I just think that the notion that Australia can stop the virus is not realistic. Just look outside the country for how they are learning to live with the virus.
not sure why you're getting down voted for stating facts that covid is here to stay and inevitably at some point the majority will catch it.
Guys before buying antigen test make sure you confirm the test kit detect Omicron variant. check the TGA link to confirm which RAT kits detect Omicron
https://www.tga.gov.au/post-market-review-antigen-and-rapid-…
Buying this advertise test above only detect Delta variant so if you are infected with Omicron it will come negative ??
I hope this helps and be safe
Thanks for the link.
I dunno why you'd need to .. Test Seal Abs?
I am a bit concerned that these test kits are made in China. Yeah there are a lot of stuff made there but still… I'm not surprised that they are not accurate.
Very misleading statements here.
You can compare these to any other tests made else where in the world, and yes they have the same accuracy rates. lol.
Damn…down the prices come~!