After New Zealand registered a single new case of COVID-19 ever since February, the entire country was sent into a rapid three-day lockdown. The community was received with dismay in the country, especially considering how New Zealand had no breakouts from the more-transmissible Delta variant. The case was detected in Auckland, with the government advising the public to follow basic public health measures such as mask wearing, hand washing and scanning QR codes to assist with contact tracing.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern highlighted how New Zealand cannot take any chances with the ‘game changer’ Delta strain. She pointed to other countries and the variants’ impact, stating how they only get one chance to deal with it. Citing Australia’s struggles to contain the variant to defend her short and sharp reaction to the case, Ardern said that it is better to start high and be cautious to then move out as soon as the country is comfortable in doing so.
Health officials have not yet established a link between the case and the border or managed isolation facilities. With the positive patient being a 58-year-old man, epidemiologist Prof Michael Baker stated that the latest case was almost certainly the delta variant. Baker said that the more optimistic scenario, despite being less likely, would be if the case was directly connected to the border without intermediary cases.
The other option, which is tougher to deal with, would be that the case appeared from an unknown source, meaning that ‘there must be other cases out in the community which haven’t been identified… That means there have been infectious people in the community, potentially for several days, and you don’t know how widespread the outbreak is.’
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Photo Source: The Guardian