Covid 19 coronavirus: Ministry of Health to head first live press conference in more than a week

Currently, there are 12 new cases of Covid-19, all in managed isolation.

Ten of the cases arrived on a flight from India on Sept. 26 on flight AI1354, said public health director Dr. Caroline McElnay, addressing the media.

She said it could be the highest number reported in one day from the same flight.

The group tested positive around the third day of their time in controlled isolation. All have been transferred to an Auckland quarantine facility.

Today’s press conference is the first since September 22, when Chief Health Officer Dr. Ashley Bloomfield was at the helm.

All 10 cases were scattered on the plane from India, between rows 14 and 41, McElnay said.

The theory is that the travelers were infected in India before boarding the flight. Genomic tests were underway and authorities would see if anything suggests transmission on the flight.

For the remaining two cases, one arrived on a flight from the United States on September 26 and tested positive on the third day of his stay.

The 12th case came from the Philippines via Taiwan on September 3. They were analyzed because they were a contact from another case and yesterday they tested positive.

McElnay said he appreciated that the number of cases today was high and reflected the high levels of Covid-19 that were showing up around the world.

“This also re-emphasizes why we have strong border control measures in place.”

New Zealand now has 53 active cases – 42 have been imported, the remainder were in the community.

Fourteen people are isolating themselves at a community Auckland quarantine facility, which includes five people who have tested positive for the virus.

A person remains in the hospital with Covid-19. They are in a general isolation ward at Middlemore Hospital.

“Since August 11, our contact tracing team has identified 4,047 close case contacts, all of whom have been contacted and are self-isolating or have completed self-isolation,” McElnay said.

The number of cases has dropped since yesterday because some records have been identified as duplicates in the Ministry’s system.

Yesterday’s cases

Yesterday, it was revealed that there was a new case of Covid-19 in managed isolation in New Zealand. There were no new cases in the community.

The case arrived in the country from France via Singapore on September 25, the ministry said in a statement.

A person with the virus was in isolation in a general ward at Middlemore Hospital.

Earlier this week, the Ministry said public health services continued to contact, trace, test and isolate close contacts of three community cases reported on September 23.

There were a total of 44 close contacts associated with those cases, all of which are self-isolating. All but one returned negative test results, with a result pending on Tuesday.

The trio is a family group tied to the 9/11 chartered flight from Christchurch to Auckland for people leaving a managed isolation facility after completing their 14-day stay.

Also on the flight was the man who tested positive for Covid-19 over the weekend, whose virus is believed to have had a rare three-week incubation period.

Yesterday’s new virus case had been transferred to the Auckland quarantine facility. In total, 17 people were isolated at the community facility, including nine who tested positive for the virus and their household contacts.

As of Aug. 11, the contact tracing team had identified 4,073 close case contacts, of which 4,073 had been contacted and self-isolated or completed self-isolation, the ministry said.

“This number has decreased since yesterday due to the records being identified as duplicates in the system.

“Twelve previously reported cases are considered to have recovered, bringing our total number of active cases to 44.

“Of those, 30 are imported cases at MIQ facilities and 14 are community cases.”

The last remaining group from New Zealand

Health and data researchers say we’re fine to lower alert levels, but level 1 should come with conditions.

In the past two weeks there have been eight community cases and none in the past four days.

Public health professor Nick Wilson said the drop in cases was a success story for New Zealand health authorities and the public.

“The situation is looking very good for Auckland. It looks like there will be downward adjustments to alert levels the next time they are reviewed.

“We are really coming back hard to get the whole country Covid free.”

Auckland’s core group, with 179 cases, was easily the largest the country faced, almost twice the size of any other.

Why are QR scan counts plummeting?

The government has drastically reduced QR code scans to an update to its NZ Covid Tracer app, but one expert suspects complacency is the biggest reason.

It comes as the government has signaled that Bluetooth-enabled tracking technology could be rolled out in November.

The August 19 Covid-19 outbreak in Auckland triggered an increase in the number of people using the phone app to scan QR codes to track contacts, from 30,659 to 1.1 million scans recorded in a week.

By the time the city emerged from the lockdown, daily numbers had reached 1.7 million and peaked at 2.5 million on September 5.

But since then, the numbers have dropped again, falling to about 2 million on Sept. 12, 1.5 million on Sept. 20, 1.2 million on Saturday and just over 975,000 on Monday.

When asked about today’s trend, a spokesperson for the Health Ministry cited an update to the app, released on September 9, as a “significant factor” in the abandonment.

While the update made the app easier to use by removing the requirement to log in before scanning, it also delayed the reporting of anonymized scan data to the ministry until users logged back into the app.

Dr Andrew Chen, a researcher at Koi Tū: The Center for Informed Futures, based at the University of Auckland, believed the key reason was that fewer people bothered to sign up.

“While I agree that this glitch would contribute to lower scan counts, I think most of it would be explained by fewer people involved.”

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