New Zealand’s summertime run without COVID-19 is over, with Auckland heading back into a three-day lockdown after the discovery of three community cases.
On Sunday, Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield announced a mother, father and their daughter had returned positive tests, with a possible link to border arrivals but no proven source.
In response, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern rushed from Auckland to the capital for an emergency cabinet meeting that decided on the snap lockdown.
“These new cases pose questions our public health staff are working around the clock to answer,” she said.
“We all feel the same way when this happens. We all have that feeling of ‘not again’.
“We have stamped out the virus before and we will do it again … we are going to be okay.”
Auckland has been placed at alert level three lockdown, with many workplaces and public venues closed, and people urged to associate only in their household bubbles.
The rest of New Zealand is at alert level two, meaning social distancing, caps on gatherings and increased mask-wearing return.
The alert levels are due to end at 11:59pm on Wednesday, but will be reviewed daily.
COVID-19 Minister Chris Hipkins said the government was still moving rapidly to trace, test and isolate close contacts of the three new cases.
“There is a number of gaps in our knowledge around these cases,” he said.
Of the three new cases, the mother looms as a likely index case, given she works at a catering company which services planes at Auckland airport.
The father is self-employed in the building industry, and the daughter is a student at Papatoetoe High School, a school with 1400 students in the south of Auckland.
The school will host a testing centre and be closed on Monday and Tuesday.
The alert level changes are the first in New Zealand since September.
“New Zealanders have enjoyed more freedoms for longer periods of time than nearly any other country in the world,” Ms Ardern said.
“We have never taken for granted how special that was.
“With COVID raging outside our borders and new, more transmissible strains of COVID-19 emerging … cabinet’s plan is based on the best science and what we know works from previous cases here, and responses we’ve observed overseas.”
The new cases come a day after New Zealand’s first COVID-related death in five months, a returnee who tested positive for the virus while in mandatory isolation and who died at Auckland’s North Shore Hospital.
The fatality was New Zealand’s 26th COVID-related death through the pandemic.
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