All but two current cases of virus in NZ linked to Auckland cluster
New Zealand has reported five new cases of coronavirus in the last 24 hours, taking the number of active cases in the country to 101.
Health Minister Chris Hipkins said of the 80 cases linked to community outbreaks in Auckland, 78 were traced to the Auckland cluster, two were still being investigated.
NZ Health and Education Minister Chris Hipkins.
Hipkins again ruled out the possibility cold surfaces or packaging at an Americold cold storage facility at Mt Wellington as the source of the cluster, saying that only four of 35 swabs taken from surfaces at the plant contained traces of the virus, but not enough of it to be genome sequenced. No virus was found on packaging.
The investigation was still ongoing, he said.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said a Rydges hotel maintenance worker who had no contact with guests, one of the two cases under investigation, may have caught the virus in a lift used by an infected guest in quarantine.
The Rydges worker used the lift minutes after the active case who returned from the US. Authorities were still testing samples of previous cases identified in isolation to see if they share genome sequencing with the Rydges staffer.
The number of new cases in Auckland has dropped from 13 on Tuesday and six on Wednesday, despite increase in testing. Some 18,000 tests were conducted on Wednesday.
The department has conducted more than 150,000 tests since the start of the Auckland outbreak.
The abrupt resurgence of infections last week prompted the government to reimpose some lockdown restrictions on the city's 1.7 million residents.
The country so far has reported just over 1300 confirmed cases and 22 deaths from the virus.
More to come
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