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Authorities are warning that the variety of circumstances are more likely to improve, elevating the prospect {that a} three-day lockdown in Auckland may very well be prolonged and placing the date of the country’s upcoming basic election unsure.
“As we all learned from our first experience with Covid, once you identify a cluster it grows before it slows,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stated at a information convention Thursday. “We should expect that to be the case here.”
But on Tuesday, New Zealand reported {that a} household of 4 in Auckland had been contaminated with coronavirus, regardless of having no historical past of abroad journey and no reference to any identified circumstances. That prompted Ardern to reintroduce coronavirus restrictions, together with shutting off entry to retirement houses, imposing the Auckland lockdown, and limiting gatherings across the country to not more than 100 folks.
On Thursday, New Zealand’s Director General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield introduced the 13 new domestically transmitted circumstances, all linked with the unique 4.
It stays unclear what prompted the newest outbreak. For months, New Zealand has imposed strict immigration controls — apart from some exceptions, the border is closed to all non-New Zealanders, and anybody getting into the country should spend 14 days in a state quarantine facility.
Authorities have used genome sequencing to analyze the supply of the outbreak, however have discovered no hyperlink between the group circumstances and imported circumstances in New Zealand’s managed isolation quarantine services, Bloomfield stated. “What we do know is that the genome sequence of the new cases broadly most closely resemble the patterns from the United Kingdom and Australia,” he stated.
One of the unique 4 labored at Americold, an American temperature-controlled warehouse firm. On Thursday, authorities introduced that three extra Americold employees members had examined optimistic, and 7 of the circumstances introduced Thursday are members of the family of Americold workers.
Authorities are testing surfaces at Americold’s warehouse for Covid-19, however Ardern emphasised that the almost certainly reason for the outbreak was human-to-human transmission. “We are wanting to rule everything out,” she stated.
New Zealand’s new cluster comes simply weeks away from a nationwide election scheduled for September 19. Parliament was set to be dissolved on Wednesday however Ardern postponed that to August 17 — and he or she is but to announce whether or not the election will go forward as initially deliberate.
On Wednesday, Ardern emphasised that Australia’s state of affairs — and the state of affairs in nations around the globe — confirmed how essential it was for New Zealand to stay to the new restriction guidelines.
“Our response to the virus so far has worked, it opened our economy and our communities, and it gave New Zealanders freedoms that we cherished, and we all want to get back there as soon as we can. But success relies on us all working together,” she stated.
“We know how to beat this, but we also know we don’t have to look far to see what it can mean if we don’t get on top of it.”
CNN’s Isaac Yee contributed reporting.
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