Covid 19 coronavirus: Ashley Bloomfield reveals new security measures for foreign aircrews

All foreign aircrews will have to complete their stops in New Zealand in controlled isolation as part of a new policy to keep borders tight.

“That is a new development,” Chief Health Officer Ashley Bloomfield told the Herald this morning.

“There has been a lot of work with the airline industry to see what we could do to further strengthen that security at the border, especially as there are an increasing number of cases in many of the countries that people are flying from.

“Crews arriving from overseas-based airlines will now be housed in managed isolation facilities before they fly again.”

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Aircrews are exempt from the regular testing of border workers that was ordered in a Public Health Response order earlier this month.

Bloomfield has repeatedly responded to concerns about this exemption by saying that work with the airlines was ongoing to ensure that a satisfactory security regime would be established.

He said the New Zealand-based crew did not have to go to an isolation or managed quarantine (MIQ) facility.

“They still do a couple of days of self-isolation and require a negative test before leaving.”

New Zealand CEO Justin Tighe-Umbers’ Board of Airline representatives said the new requirements will likely be implemented before the end of the month.

“Airlines recognize the need to comply with measures that will keep New Zealand and the border safe.

“They are comfortable meeting the requirements, and in fact some of them are already housed in some of those facilities.”

Only 31 percent of genomically sequenced MIQ cases

All positive cases will now be genomically sequenced to provide the best clues to the source of an outbreak and how the cases are linked, Bloomfield said.

How the current Auckland group got started is still uncertain, and efforts to find the source have been hampered by the small proportion of MIQ cases that were genomically sequenced.

Only about 20 percent of the 143 MIQ cases had been sequenced by Aug. 11, when the outbreak was first detected.

Currently, 49 out of 158 MIQ cases (31%) have been sequenced, although the rate is much higher for the 1,464 confirmed cases in New Zealand.

“Of all the samples since the start of the pandemic in New Zealand, [ESR] they have performed full genome sequencing in more than 50 percent of the cases, which is actually one of the highest in the world, “said Bloomfield.

“Our plan now is for us to do a full genome sequencing on every positive result we get.”

When asked why the MIQ case rate was so low, Bloomfield said, “Because it wasn’t being done routinely.”

In recent weeks, he said that ESR had been recovering and sampling as many MIQ cases as possible, focusing on cases arriving from the UK, where the Covid-19 strain of the Auckland cluster is most frequently found.

“And they started looking for samples from people who tested positive in July, people whose index case probably contracted an infection, if it came through MIQ.

“They haven’t found a match yet, so there’s no idea, but they’re obviously still looking.”

He said there was nothing new to report on the genome sequencing of the weak positive case he identified yesterday.

Level 1 Message: Get Tested for Symptoms

As the country outside Auckland moved to Level 1 yesterday, Bloomfield emphasized the importance of ongoing testing.

The message going forward will be for anyone who has symptoms to get tested, he said.

This is different from the end of June, when the message was for symptomatic people to get tested only if they had been abroad or had been in contact with a positive case, someone who worked at the border or at MIQ facilities, or someone who had been overseas.

“We were entering winter and primary care was concerned that they were being overwhelmed by having to test everyone who might have a respiratory infection,” Bloomfield said of the June messages.

“And people just didn’t see the need to get tested because we were saying that we had effectively eliminated community broadcasting.”

That led to the daily test numbers steadily dropping below the recommended 4,000 per day, which could have made a difference in detecting the current outbreak earlier.

When Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern issued the “say yes to the test” message, the current outbreak was already spreading.

“Now we will focus on testing anyone with respiratory symptoms, in addition to monitoring [testing] around borders and certain groups, “Bloomfield said.

“There will be more testing of asymptomatic people as part of the ongoing testing through alert level 1 to keep the numbers high and to try to get very early notification if there is any infection.”

The next two weeks will focus on the tourism and hospitality businesses, given the continued risk of someone carrying Covid-19 out of Auckland, which goes to alert level 2 at 11:59 p.m. tonight.

The use of pop-up test stations, GP offices and community assessment centers will continue, along with regular testing of border workers.

“Those are the workers who are closest to an infection, potentially crossing the border at both airports and seaports.”