Random door-knock COVID-19 testing will take place across Perth beginning from tomorrow as cases continue to surge.
The Western Australian Government has provided more than $130,000 to the Telethon Kids Institute to go door-to-door across a range of metropolitan Perth suburbs, asking household members if they would like to do a COVID-19 test.
Participation is voluntary and the tests use a new technology called LAMP.
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The study will be carried out across several weekends and aims to find COVID-19 cases going undetected in the community.
The state's COVID-19 cases ballooned to 7151 new infections yesterday, the highest the state has ever recorded.
"We are very close to hitting the peak of COVID-19 cases in Western Australia, so now is the ideal time for this study to be conducted," WA Health Minister Amber-Jade Sanderson said.
"We have always suspected that there are more COVID-19 cases in the community than daily testing results show."
Residents will put saliva on the end of a cue tip which will go into a tube to be processed.
They will also be asked questions about their age, type of work or study and vaccination status.
The project aims to test a total of 875 people.
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Residents in Bassendean, Claremont and Melville will be the first suburbs targeted, with flyers set to be dropped in their letterbox.
"We know that some people who get COVID are asymptomatic - people who are feeling perfectly normal are probably not going to get tested unless they are required to under isolation rules," Ms Sanderson said.
"Given Western Australia's high vaccination rates, this is not surprising.
"This research will be another tool for us to better understand the spread of the virus."
The test is not yet approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, so anyone who returns a positive result will need a PCR or a rapid antigen test.
However, researchers believe the test is more accurate at detecting COVID-19 than a RAT.
Perth company Avicena developed the Sentinel machine which incorporates LAMP technology with smart robotics, allowing test samples to be processed in bulk.
