Authorities warn that the number of cases is likely to increase, increasing the likelihood that a three-day lockout could be extended in Auckland and casting doubt on the date of the country’s upcoming general elections.
“As we all learned from our first experience with Covid, once you identify a cluster, it grows before it slows down,” said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at a news conference Thursday. “We should expect this to be the case here.”
But on Tuesday, New Zealand reported that a family of four in Auckland was infected with coronavirus, despite having no history of foreign travel and no connection to known affairs. This prompted Ardern to reintroduce restrictions on coronavirus, including closing locks, closing Auckland locks, and restricting meetings across the country to no more than 100 people.
On Thursday, the Director-General of Health of New Zealand announced Dr. Ashley Bloomfield handed over the 13 new locally-owned cases, all connected to the original four.
It remains unclear what caused the recent outbreak. For months, New Zealand has imposed strict immigration controls – with some exceptions, the border has been closed to all non-New Zealanders, and anyone entering the country must spend 14 days in a state quarantine facility.
Authorities have used genome sequencing to investigate the source of the outbreak, but have found no link between community cases and imported cases into New Zealand’s controlled isolation facilities, Bloomfield said. “What we do know is that the genomic sequence of the new cases most closely resembles the patterns from the United Kingdom and Australia,” he said.
One of the original four worked at Americold, an American temperature-controlled warehouse company. On Thursday, authorities announced that three more Americold employees had tested positive, and seven of the cases announced Thursday are family members of Americold employees.
Authorities are testing surfaces in Americold’s warehouse for Covid-19, but Ardern claims that the most likely cause of the outbreak was human-to-human transmission. “We want to exclude everything,” she said.
New Zealand’s new cluster is just weeks away from a September 19 national election plan. Parliament was dissolved on Wednesday, but Ardern has postponed it until August 17 – and she has yet to announce whether the election will go ahead as originally planned.
On Wednesday, Ardern emphasized that the situation in Australia – and the situation in countries around the world – showed how important it was for New Zealand to adhere to the new restriction rules.
“Our response to the virus so far has worked. It has opened up our economy and our communities, and it has given New Zealanders freedoms that we cherish, and we all want to return as soon as we can. But success is reaching out to all of us. to work together, ”she said.
“We know how to defeat this, but we also know that we do not have to look far to see what it can mean if we do not get over it.”
CNN’s Isaac Yee contributed reporting.
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