Workers and shoppers dine on 29 October 2020 on the steps of Freyberg Place in central Auckland, New Zealand, enjoying the freedom of Covid-19 Alert Level 1.
Lynn Grieveson | Newsroom | Getty Images
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Sunday announced a three – day closure in the country’s largest city Auckland, after three cases of COVID-19 emerged, the first local infection since late January.
Level 3 restrictions require everyone to stay at home except for essential shopping and work, Ardern said, reiterating the country’s rigorous approach over the past year to virtually eliminate the pandemic.
“We have eliminated the virus before and we will do it again,” Ardern told a news conference in the capital Wellington.
New Zealand, which had more than two months without local infections before the incident in January, will vaccinate its five million people against the new coronavirus on February 20 and receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine earlier than expected.
Restrictions have been raised to level 3 through Wednesday, which bans public places and bans gatherings outside homes, except for weddings and funerals for up to ten people. Schools will remain open to children of essential workers, but others have been asked to stay at home.
Sunday’s cases were a couple and their daughter in Auckland, the first local infection since Jan. 24.
Health authorities are trying to find out if these cases involve any of the new, highly contagious variants and how the family contracted the virus, Ardern said.
“Three days should give us enough time to gather further information, do large-scale tests and determine if there was wider community transfer,” she said. “We think this is the cautious approach and it is the right thing to do.”
The prime minister said there was no need to stockpile goods as essential services – including supermarkets, pharmacies and filling stations – would remain open. Yet long queues formed outside Auckland supermarkets, and photos on social media showed empty grocery shelves.
Airline was contacted because the woman in the infected family works at a catering company LSG Sky Chefs, where she mostly works in laundry facilities, officials said.
The COVID-19 warning for the rest of the country has been raised to level 2, with all gatherings limited to 100 people, including at restaurants and cafes.
Australia on Sunday reported two new local COVID-19 cases in the neighboring state of Victoria, the country, on the second day of a rapid exclusion to contain the spread of the highly contagious British variant.
The two cases, including a 3-year-old child, were the first not to have domestic contact with a group of infected workers in a quarantine hotel at Melbourne airport, which caused the five-day closure.
The hotel group has now affected 16 people.
New Zealand and Australia closed their international borders and introduced strict social distance rules early in the pandemic, which dramatically reduced the spread of the virus. New Zealand was the country that performed best in an index of almost 100 countries, based on the coronavirus.