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ALDEN WILLIAMS / Stuff
The Health Ministry has been working to find and test any close contacts, and the results are expected to be revealed Monday afternoon (file photo).
This story was originally published on RNZ.co.nz and republished with permission.
The scope of New Zealand’s latest Covid-19 cluster will be released on Monday.
The “November quarantine group,” as it is called, began when a quarantine worker at Auckland’s Jet Park facility tested positive for the virus on Friday.
Only one of the quarantine worker’s 25 close contacts has tested positive so far – he’s another Defense Forces staff member who was in Auckland for work last week.
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Breakfast
The device was deployed in Rotorua to find out if it is more effective than the current system.
Then that person flew back to Wellington on Thursday, visited various locations within Auckland Airport and also went to a restaurant in central Wellington on Friday for lunch.
The Health Ministry said it sent push notifications to the smartphones of people who used the Covid Tracer app to log into “various places of interest” that were visited by the positive case.
Those locations are:
- Domestic Terminal, Auckland Airport: 5.30pm – 7.45pm, November 5
- Avis Car Rental, Auckland Airport: 5 November 5:00 PM – 5:15 PM
- Orleans Chicken & Waffles, Auckland Airport: 5 November from 5.30 p.m. to 7 p.m.
- The Gypsy Moth, Auckland Airport: 7:00 PM to 7:15 PM, November 5
- Hudsons, Auckland Airport: 7:00 p.m. to 7:15 p.m., November 5
- Little Penang, The Terrace, Wellington: 1:15 PM – 3:45 PM, 6 November
Users were informed that they may have been in contact with Covid-19, and were told that if they started to feel unwell, contact Healthline.
The Health Ministry has been working to find and test close contacts, and the results are expected to be revealed Monday afternoon.
Public health professor Michael Baker said those results will show the scope and severity of the group.
“That will give us a much better idea of whether this outbreak is on the low-risk end, which hopefully it is, or if it has some characteristics that make it a high-risk event.”
Such outbreaks shouldn’t be happening in the first place, he said.
“[It’s] our seventh border fault in about three months.
“Obviously, this is a pattern here, and I think five of them were personnel working in those facilities. Really none of those people should be infected at this stage, so I think we need a systematic way to reduce that risk.
“When that happens, we have to say that it is a system failure or an infection control failure.
“First, we need to control the outbreak and second, find out what went wrong to prevent it from happening again.”
The University of Otago academic has been calling on the government to change Managed Isolation and Quarantine facilities from the one-size-fits-all approach currently adopted.
Baker wants travelers from low-risk countries, like Australia and Pacific island nations, to be able to enter without being quarantined.
For those in countries where the spread of the virus is but well controlled, such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore, there would still be a 14-day stay in isolation, but some of it could be done from home.
But for higher-risk countries – UK, US, Russia, and India – pre-travel requirements could go into effect, and travelers could spend three days in quarantine and return a negative test, even before traveling. . Then when they arrived in New Zealand, they would stay in a specially designed quarantine facility, not a hotel.
This story was originally published on RNZ.co.nz and republished with permission.
