New Zealand, which has been praised for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, put its largest city back in lockdown on Wednesday after the country recorded its first COVID-19 cases in more than three months.
Four members of one family in Auckland tested positive, prompting Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to reintroduce strict restrictions in the city and reintroduce social distancing measures across the country until at least Friday.
To complicate the situation, health officials said two members of the infected family visited tourist sites in the city of Rotorua, about 140 miles southwest of Auckland, expanding the number of people who could have been potentially exposed. The family had not traveled abroad.
“As we have seen in other countries where a restart is taking place, it is incredibly important to act early,” said Ashley Bloomfield, Director General of Health.
“We have done this before and we can do it again,” he added.
Residents of Auckland, a city of about 1.7 million people, had very little time to prepare for the return trip to Level 3 restrictions, which require people to stay home, work from home and, if it is possible to wear masks when going outside. All schools, public facilities, bars, restaurants and businesses were also close by.
Police deployed roadblocks to discourage a mass exodus from Auckland, while supermarkets slashed sales of some staple products amid a rush to the shelves. Long queues formed at COVID-19 test centers in the city.
Although the source of the virus is unknown, health officials are investigating whether the virus could be imported by cargo.
New Zealand, which is holding a national election in mid-September, has managed to keep the virus under control during the whole pandemic, recording 1,225 confirmed cases and 22 deaths.
Although it has a small population, with less than 5 million people, New Zealand has recorded just 4.56 deaths per million people, compared to nearly 500 per million in the United States, according to figures from the University of Oxford.
In June, Ardern famously said she “did a little dance” to celebrate the news that New Zealand did not have any active cases of COVID-19.
While the recovery of the virus after 102 days of no local transmission is a blow to the nation’s efforts to quell the pandemic, Ardern remained optimistic.
“If we get our immediate response in this critical phase, we have the opportunity to reduce the time that we will have those heavier constraints, and that is a lesson we have all learned together,” Arden said, adding that the new restrictions will be very frustrating for many people.
Meanwhile, neighboring Australia recorded its deadliest day of the coronavirus pandemic on Wednesday and the largest daily rise in infections in three days.
A cluster of infections in Melbourne, the second-largest city in Australia, caused authorities to impose a nightmare last week, restricting the daily movements of people and ordering large parts of the state economy to close.
Officials in the country’s outer Northern Territory said Tuesday that they will continue to maintain strict border controls until at least 2022.
“If you can, cancel your Christmas holiday plans and stay here in the Northern Territory,” the territory’s Prime Minister Michael Gunner told the Australian ABC News channel.
Worldwide, the number of COVID-19 cases has now dropped to 20 million, of which the US, Brazil and India account for more than half of them, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The worldwide death toll is hovering over 740,000.
The virus has wreaked havoc on the world economy, with monetary effects of the pandemic leaving hundreds of thousands of people around the world unemployed or relying on government furlough schemes.
The largest contraction reported by any major economy to date was announced in the UK on Wednesday.
Officials said Britain’s economy shrank by a record 20.4 percent between April and June as it entered a recession for the first time in 11 years.
“Today’s figures show that hard times are here,” Chancellor Rishi Sunak told UK news agency Sky News, which like NBC News is owned by Comcast. “Hundreds of thousands of people have already lost their jobs and many more will.”
Britain suffers the worst coronavirus outbreak in Europe with so far more than 46,000 deaths.
Reuters contributed to this report.
