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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered the country’s largest city, Auckland, to be closed for the first time in nearly six months, after three cases of coronavirus emerged in the community.
The Pacific island nation has been widely praised for its handling of the pandemic, with just 25 deaths out of a population of five million.
But today nearly two million residents were told to stay home starting at midnight, when the level three closure begins, and schools and businesses must close except for essential services.
“The main thing we ask of the people of Auckland is to stay home to avoid any risk of spread,” Ardern said.
He added that the restrictions were “just in case it could be one of the most transmissible strains of Covid on which we must act with a high degree of caution.”
It came after three members of an Auckland family tested positive, and authorities were concerned about the “new and active” infections as there was no obvious source of transmission.
The city will also be fenced off from the rest of New Zealand, and travel in and out of the metropolis will be severely restricted for the next three days.
The rest of the country will go to alert level two, Ardern said, with people forced to wear masks on public transportation and meetings limited to a maximum of 100 people.
“I know we all feel the same when this happens, not again,” he said.
“But remember, we’ve been here before, that means we know how to get out of this – together.”
Health officials said a mother, who works for a company that provides laundry and catering services on international flights, and her daughter tested positive yesterday, before the father returned a positive sample today.
A fourth member of the household also shows symptoms of Covid-19, but tested negative.
New Zealand Health Director General Ashley Bloomfield said the initial focus was on the mother’s workplace “because of its obvious connections to the border.”
But it added that it was “too early to rule out” any source of transmission and that the woman had not worked for eight days before testing positive.
Auckland spent more than two weeks locked up last August after a virus outbreak linked a worker in a refrigerated store handling imported frozen cargo, but New Zealand has been enjoying relaxed restrictions for months.
Several cases of Covid-19 were also detected in the city three weeks ago, before being traced to a hotel where people had completed the quarantine after arriving from abroad.
Ms Ardern has been widely praised for her handling of the pandemic, with New Zealand registering fewer than 2,000 infections.
The country closed its borders and implemented a strict five-week lockdown in March and April last year, with occasional virus outbreaks since then that have been quickly contained.
Ardern has said that New Zealand’s borders are likely to remain closed for the rest of this year as the pandemic continues to sweep across the world.
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