New Zealand locks downward Auckland after 3 fresh local Covid-19 cases
New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Sunday announced a three-day lockdown on the country's most important city Auckland, after 3 COVID-19 cases emerged, the first localized infections since overdue January.
Level 3 restrictions will require everyone to remain home except for essential shopping and imperative job, Ardern said, repeating the strict methodology the united states has taken over the past year in nearly eliminating the pandemic.
"We've stamped out the virus before and we'll do it again," Ardern told a news conference in the capital, Wellington. New Zealand, which had opted more than 8 weeks without local infections prior to the January circumstance, is to get started on inoculating its 5 million persons against the new coronavirus on Feb. 20, getting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine sooner than anticipated. Sunday's situations were a few and their daughter in Auckland, the primary local infections since Jan. 24.
Health authorities try to learn whether these circumstances involve the new, highly infectious variants and the way the family contracted the virus, Ardern said.
The prime minister said there is no need to fill up on goods, as essential services - including supermarkets, pharmacies and petrol stations - would remain open. Still, very long queues produced outside Auckland supermarkets, and pics on social media demonstrated empty grocery shelves.
Airlines have been contacted, as the woman in the infected family group works for an airline catering provider, LSG Sky Chefs, where she mostly works found in laundry facilities, officials said.
Both cases, including a 3-year-old child, were the first who weren't household contacts of a cluster of infected personnel at a quarantine hotel at Melbourne airport which triggered the five-day lockdown, health authorities said.
The hotel cluster has now affected 16 people.
New Zealand and Australia shut their international borders and introduced rigorous social distancing rules early on in the pandemic, drastically reducing the pass on of the virus. New Zealand was rated the best-performing nation within an index of nearly 100 countries predicated on containment of the corona virus.
