New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has told Auckland residents to respect the stage three restrictions imposed by the government to help quickly control and eliminate the new coronavirus outbreak.
A cluster of four initial cases within the one family from South Auckland has increased to 17 cases.
“As we all learnt from our first experience with COVID, once you identify a cluster it grows before it slows and we should expect that to be the case here,” the Prime Minister said.
New Zealand Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield advised the public on the health response to the outbreak and announced additional pop-up testing sites would be constructed over the next few days.
He said one of the people who tested positive for the virus had visited an aged residential care facility and the government had taken action to close to the public all nursing home facilities across the country.
Providing an update on the genome sequencing investigation seeking to identify ‘patient zero, Mr Bloomfield said a link between the new cases and overseas travellers who stayed in Managed Isolation and Quarantine had not been found.
However, he praised Kiwis for an increase of 338,000 registrations for the NZ COVID tracer app in the last 24 hours.
The alert function on the app was used for the first time to inform people if they had scanned into locations at the same time as people who visited the same place and later tested positive for the virus.
