Workers and shoppers eat on the steps of Freyberg Place in downtown Auckland, New Zealand, on October 29, 2020, enjoying the freedom of the Covid-19 alert level 1.
Lynn Grieveson | Writing Getty Images
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a three-day blockade in Auckland’s largest city on Sunday, following three COVID-19 cases, the first local infections in late January.
Level 3 restrictions will require everyone to stay home except essential shopping and essential work, Ardern said, repeating the strict approach the country has taken over the past year, virtually eliminating 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 has been without local infections for more than two months before the January case, is set to begin inoculating 5 million people against the new coronavirus on February 20, receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine sooner than expected.
Restrictions were raised to level 3 by Wednesday, closing public places and banning gatherings outside homes, except for weddings and funerals of up to 10 people. Schools will remain open to the children of essential workers, but others have been asked to stay home.
Sunday’s cases were a couple and their daughter in Auckland, the first local infections since January 24.
Health authorities are trying to find out if these cases involve any of the new highly infectious variants and how the family contracted the virus, Ardern said.
“Three days should give us enough time to gather additional information, carry out large-scale tests and determine whether there has been a wider Community transmission,” she said. “This is what we believe requires a prudent approach and is what needs to be done.”
The prime minister said there was no need to stock up on goods, as essential services – including supermarkets, pharmacies and petrol stations – would remain open. However, long queues formed outside Auckland supermarkets, and social media images showed empty grocery shelves.
The airlines were contacted because the woman in the infected family works for an air catering company, LSG Sky Chefs, where she works mostly in laundries, officials said.
The COVID-19 alert for the rest of the country has been raised to level 2, with all meetings limited to 100 people, including restaurants and cafes.
Australia on Sunday reported two new local cases of COVID-19 in the second most populous state in the country, Victoria, on the second day of the rapid blockade to contain the spread of the highly infectious variant in the UK.
The two cases, including a 3-year-old child, were the first non-domestic contacts of a group of infected workers at a quarantine hotel at Melbourne airport, which triggered the five-day blockade, they said. said the health authorities.
The hotel cluster has now affected 16 people.
New Zealand and Australia have closed their international borders and introduced strict rules of social distance at the beginning of the pandemic, dramatically reducing the spread of the virus. New Zealand was ranked as the best performing nation in an index of almost 100 countries, based on coronavirus confinement.