On Friday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that Auckland – the city of some 1.5 million people at the center of the new outbreak – will remain below a level three lockdown for another 12 days, while the rest of the country will remain below level two restrictions, meaning meetings are limited to a maximum of 100 people. The rules extend restrictions that came into effect earlier this week.
Under level three restrictions, people will be told to stay home for essential personal movement, schools will operate on limited capacity, and public locations such as museums, playgrounds and gyms will remain closed.
The fresh outbreak is a blow to New Zealand. The country has been under one of the world’s toughest lockdowns for five weeks, which closed most businesses and schools, and saw people stay at home.
Ardern has warned that she expects to see more cases.
“Now lifting restrictions and seeing an explosion of cases is the worst thing we could do for Auckland and for the New Zealand economy,” she said. “We lost Covid before … We can do it all over again.”
At a press conference Friday, Bloomfield said 771 close contacts of the confirmed cases were identified, and more than 15,700 tests were processed on Thursday – the highest number of tests processed in a single day in the country.
Since the outbreak, New Zealand has conducted more than 500,000 tests. It has reported a total of 1,251 cases of coronavirus, including 22 deaths.
What caused the outbreak?
There is another important, unanswered question: How did this outbreak come about?
To date, authorities have not found an agreement between the genome involved in this latest outbreak and all cases in controlled isolation facilities. Bloomfield said the new cases most closely resemble the genome patterns from the UK and Australia.
Bloomfield thinks the outbreak could have come in through the isolation facilities instead of being present in New Zealand for months.
“I think there is very good evidence to suggest that it is not lurked in the community,” he said. Ardern said Friday that the tension in the new outbreak is not the same as one that previously existed in New Zealand.
Authorities are also testing surface samples at Americold, a U.S. temperature-controlled warehouse company where one of the original four worked to test positive. A number of cases have been linked to the company.
But Ardern said authorities initially did not know how the outbreak happened.
“We do not necessarily have to answer this question in order to deal effectively with this cluster,” she said.
How New Zealand compares
The recent outbreak of New Zealand has drawn parallels with Australia and Hong Kong – both places that imposed strict border measures when they had low infection rates and appeared to have the virus under control, only to have a recurrence of the virus. belibjen.
On Thursday, Ardern noted that New Zealand had imposed restrictions within 24 hours of the first cases of the new community coronavirus – a reaction it said was faster in Hong Kong or Victoria.
“The pace and speed should also act as an extra layer of reassurance,” she said Thursday, before repeating the mantra she said since the start of the outbreak: “Going fast and early is still the best course of action. “
CNN’s Isaac Yee contributed to this story.
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