Two coronavirus infections that prompted a snap lockdown of New Zealand’s largest city on Monday have been revealed asthe country’s first cases of the UK strain, reports AFP.
New Zealand’s health ministry said tests had identified that the infections in Auckland were caused by the highly contagious variant first found in theUK, with no link to any other positive cases detected so far in New Zealand.
“This result reinforces the decision to take swift and robust action aroundthe latest cases to detect and stamp out the possibility of any furthertransmission,” the ministry said.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered a three-day lockdown for almost twomillion Auckland residents from Monday, with schools and non-essentialbusinesses forced to close.No new infections had been detected beyond the initial cluster of threecases in one family, but health officials are rushing to find out how thevirus entered the largely Covid-free country.
New Zealand director-general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, said the initialfocus was on the mother’s workplace — a company providing laundry servicesto international flights — “because of its obvious connections to theborder”.
But he cautioned it was “too soon to rule in or out” any source oftransmission and the woman had not been at work for eight days before testingpositive.
As tracing and testing ramped up, the streets of central Auckland werelargely empty on the first day of the lockdown, with torrential rain helpingto discourage people from venturing outdoors.
Covid-19 testing centres were busy, though, and there were long lines ofvehicles stopped at police roadblocks as people tried to leave the citydespite the lockdown.The city has been ring-fenced from the rest of New Zealand, with travel inand out of the metropolis highly restricted for the next three days.
It was the first clampdown in nearly six months in the Pacific islandnation, which has been widely praised for its handling of the pandemic, withjust 25 deaths in a population of five million.
The remainder of the country was placed on a lower alert level, with peoplerequired to wear masks on public transport and gatherings limited to amaximum of 100 people.
“I know we all feel the same way when this happens — not again,” Ardernsaid in announcing the measures on Sunday afternoon.“But remember, we have been here before, that means we know how to get outof this — together.”
Auckland spent more than two weeks in lockdown last August after a virusoutbreak was linked to a worker handling imported frozen freight, but New
Zealand has largely been enjoying relaxed restrictions for months.Several cases of the South African variant of Covid-19 were also detectedin the city three weeks ago, before being traced back to a hotel where thepeople had completed quarantine after arriving from overseas.
That outbreak was successfully contained without a lockdown, even thoughthe South African Covid-19 variant is also considered highly infectious.Ardern has been widely praised for her management of the pandemic, with NewZealand recording fewer than 2,000 infections.
The country closed its borders and implemented a strict five-week lockdown
in March and April last year, with occasional outbreaks since then beingquickly contained.