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Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins says contact tracing shows that the two new community cases come from the daughter of the Case A family.
Hipkins told RNZ Control that after the large amount of testing and contact tracing over the past three days, they were satisfied that the risk of spread in the community was low.
ROBERT KITCHEN / Things
Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins and Chief Health Officer Dr. Ashley Bloomfield in a Covid update at the Beehive Theatrette.
“We are not completely out of the woods yet, we are going to level two, we will not go down to level one, but we are sure that in the rest of the country New Zealand can go back to level one and in Auckland we still have a little more work to do. do “.
If there are more infections among known contacts than existing cases, there is no cause for alarm, says Hipkins.
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“If we are seeing new cases that are not connected to our existing cases, that is something we will look at differently.”
Despite saying that there may still be new community cases linked to the cluster, he was “very confident” in the decision to lower the alert levels.
Auckland and New Zealand will go down one level each, to levels 2 and 1 respectively, starting at midnight tonight.
“I’m certainly not going to say that there won’t be any more cases outside of this cluster, but as long as they are connected to the cluster and our contact tracing system identifies them, then we can manage that without the need for an escalation level of alert,” he said. Hipkins.
In making the decision to change alert levels, the government had wanted to ensure that it had eliminated the risk of undetected community transmission.
“We have done a good wave of tests, contact tracing in these cases to identify whether or not there was undetected community transmission. Now we are satisfied that the risk of that is low …
“There is an important distinction to make here because it relates to alert level. We are now treating these three new cases the same way we would have if we had not already been at alert level 3 and alert level 2 during the rest of the country.
“So we rely on our alert level system to isolate their close contacts, to do the tests, to eradicate the virus in that way.
“The escalation of the alert level is for where there could be undetected community transmission.”
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Professor Gorman believes that a culture change is necessary to improve the country’s response to the virus.
Auckland University professor Des Gorman said he was uncomfortable with the decision to lower alert levels.
“I think the reason I share that discomfort is because the level of risk that we seem to tolerate is going up and down almost unperturbed,” he said. Control.
“For example, the Ministry of Health found out about these cases on Saturday night, but did not think that it was necessary to warn the prime minister for 12 hours. So things that should have been canceled if we needed to be at alert level 3” . .. They were not.
“I can’t see a consistency in our appetite for risk, it seems to go up and down depending on the perspective of the situation.”
Most reassuring was the absence of virus particles in the wastewater test results, he said.
The new cases were more recent than the other cases identified in the group, Hipkins said.
The tests showed that “they had recently been infected and had been incubating the virus for a shorter period of time.”
When asked about the new case working at a McDonald’s restaurant in South Auckland, Hipkins said: “My understanding of the time period in question here is that the risk is still quite low.”
The source of the community transmission that led to the cluster is still unknown.
