In an unscheduled press conference after the discovery of two Covid-19 cases in the Waikato on Sunday, Jacinda Ardern announced the north Waikato would move to Level 3 for five days
Large swathes of the Waikato will move to Level 3 from 11:59pm tonight, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced.
The Level 3 restrictions in Raglan, Te Kauwhata, Ngāruawāhia, Huntly and Hamilton City will last for at least five days as officials scramble to test and contact trace around two new Covid-19 cases detected today.
The two cases - one in Raglan, one in Hamilton East - are connected to one another but health officials have yet to linked them up to the Auckland outbreak. The news came after a truck driver from Auckland who had driven to Palmerston North tested positive, but Ardern said the situation in that city was different and escalated restrictions were not yet needed.
The Raglan case was tested on Friday after becoming symptomatic and they are considered to have been infectious from Monday. They and their household contacts are being moved to a quarantine facility in Auckland.
In Hamilton, the case is now in hospital due to Covid-19 symptoms. They were tested yesterday and are a close contact of the Raglan case.
At the Sunday press conference, Ardern took the opportunity to highlight the importance of vaccination. She said that if Raglan or Hamilton had reached a 90 percent vaccination threshold, they would likely not be moving to Level 3 due to the new cases. The burden would instead fall on contact tracing, testing and other tools.
The same principle applied to elsewhere in the country as well, Ardern said. Vaccinations can be scheduled at bookmyvaccine.nz.
"As we all look ahead and think about summer, and the plans we are making, make the first step a vaccine. It is the thing that will make those summer plans possible," Ardern said.
Raised alert levels in the Waikato would be considered separate from the situation in Auckland and would not necessarily affect the supercity's ability to move to Level 2.
The Cabinet will meet again on Monday to consider Auckland's alert levels, but a range of experts have urged the Government to keep the city at Level 3. The Prime Minister's own Chief Science Advisor, Juliet Gerrard, said on social media that there was a "consensus" against moving to Level 2.
