Categories: AsiaCOVID-19NewsWorld

New Zealand COVID-19 Cluster Raising Questions

After weeks of no community transmission cases of COVID-19, New Zealand has been rocked in recent days by a comparatively huge spike in person-to-person transmissions in and around Auckland in the north of the country.

Fourteen new cases have been reported today including 13 cases of domestic transmission, leading officials to scramble to track the original source, with people still reeling from the discovery of four infected individuals in the same family on Tuesday.

Prior to the discovery, New Zealand had gone more than three months without a single registered case of the virus having been transmitted domestically, leading to it being held up as the poster-child of effective anti-COVID measures.

The number of cases now deemed “active” in New Zealand numbers 36.

As a precaution, the prime minister imposed an Auckland wide lockdown on the city of 1.7 million in response to the latest cases, falling back on a temporary get out of jail term – “things will get worse before they get better”, to help counter her critics, before then adding “(O)nce again we are reminded of how tricky this virus is and how easily it can spread.”
“Going hard and early is still the best course of action” she added without expanding.
Speaking to New Zealand’s Newstalk ZB Radio, Director-General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield said officials were moving “closer every hour” to finding patient zero, adding “We are working flat out to do the contact-tracing we need to do and trace back to find out what the source of this infection is.”
He also underlined the possibility that a freight shipment transmitted into the general populace by a storage worker on the list of newly infected individuals could be considered “a low possibility” of the virus having spiked now.
Lisa Conklin

Lisa is an Eastender from London in her second year in Taipei where she teaches English, and in her spare time writes poetry. She is a practicing vegan and lover of yoga who lives 'off-grid' as much as possible. She is our weekend editor.

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