New Zealand’s Auckland Covid Outbreak Identified As UK Variant

The three cases of Covid-19 that have caused around 1.6 million people in Aukland, New Zealand to go into a new lockdown from this morning, Monday 15, have been identified as being of the UK variant, as confirmed by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern after genomic testing had been carried out on the three infected people.

The three-day lockdown, with a ban on non-essential movement, is scheduled to last until midnight on Wednesday and is the country’s second lockdown after New Zealand was previously closed down completely for 51 days, which saw the virus eliminated.

Auckland faces level three restrictions, but the rest of the country is at level two, which mandates social distancing, limits on numbers gathering, and increases mask-wearing, and at present, it is not known whether the lockdown might extend past Wednesday until more data and checks on the three infected people, a father, mother, and daughter, is checked.

Prime Minister Ardern told Radio NZ, “We were right to take a cautious approach and focus on safety because we’ve confirmed it is the UK variant. Based on that sequencing we haven’t been able to link it to any of our managed isolation facilities, it wasn’t someone who went from an airline into our managed isolation”.

She added, “There may be a scenario where we aren’t able to answer what happened here”, as it has been rumoured that the family never filled in the personal contact tracing that the government asks people to do.

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