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Covid 19 NZ: Country on knife-edge as 10,000 contacts of Delta cases identified across over 200 locations
Henry Cooke05:00, Aug 22 2021
TVNZ
Another 21 community cases of Covid-19 were announced at Saturday's daily briefing by the Prime Minister.
It’s a race against time to rein in the Delta outbreak as the number of people potentially exposed surges to 10,000 plus. But after 40,000 tests, finding just 21 cases, there is also cautious optimism, Henry Cooke reports.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has prepared Kiwis for a sharp rise in the number of
Covid cases after revealing the
daily caseload rose by another 21 people on Saturday, taking the total to 51.
After just six days, it is already New Zealand’s
sixth-largest cluster, and the Ministry of Health has identified 10,000 Kiwis who may have come into contact with a positive case, at a whopping
219 places of interest.
ROBERT KITCHIN/Stuff
Ardern said on Saturday the case numbers were likely to rise.
“We’ve always said cases will rise before they fall, and based on the
experience of overseas countries, we do expect cases to rise throughout next week,” Ardern said.
READ MORE:
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* Covid-19 NZ: How the coronavirus cases in the Delta variant outbreak are connected
* Covid-19: What a move to alert level 4 means for New Zealand
* Covid-19: The three little letters that may lead to a level 4 lockdown - NSW
University of Auckland modeller Shaun Hendy, whose models the Prime Minister relies on, acknowledged the country was on a knife-edge, and said there was still a lot of uncertainty about the extent to which the positive cases in high-risk places like a church and a nightclub had spread the virus.
“There's the potential for much larger numbers. If you just look at the list of locations of interest and some of the events that we've heard about, the awards show, the nightclub, there’s the potential for one of those events to be a super-spreader event – in which case we could see numbers come in that are significantly worse,” Hendy said.
ROBERT KITCHIN/Stuff
Wellington under alert level 4. Experts are confident alert level 4 will work on Delta.
He expected the daily case numbers could easily reach as high as 90 over the next few days before the effects of level 4 started to be seen.
By Tuesday or Wednesday, the numbers would start to show the effect of the level 4 lockdown, and wastewater and community testing would be able to show whether there was serious spread outside of Auckland.
While
three new cases showed up in Wellington on Saturday, two of them had flown in from Auckland, while the other was infected by another household contact. There is no infection recorded outside of a household in Wellington yet, and all of the cases have been genomically linked to the Auckland cluster.
It is still not clear how well level 4 lockdown will work against the highly-transmissible delta variant, even with the new mask mandate for journeys out of the house.
STACY SQUIRES/Stuff
A huge number of people got tests on Friday.
“We know how well level 4 worked last year, but we are dealing with a different variant and it is more transmissible,” Hendy said.
“It’s what is happening right now that will determine the final size of the cluster."
University of Otago epidemiologist Michael Baker was upbeat about the chances of containing the cluster , saying just 21 positives out of a record 40,000 tests was good news.
“We’ll see more cases, and we may see more tomorrow. I would say at this stage things are looking positive,” Baker said.
Essential coronavirus information
“The picture is looking somewhat as predicted and that’s what we want at this moment.”
He said early and vigorous lockdown measures had
worked against Delta in Australian states like Queensland and South Australia, keeping case numbers relatively low, and New Zealand had caught this case early.
“People who have acted in a similar way to New Zealand have achieved high success. Despite the name it's still the same virus.”
Ardern on Saturday announced that the Government was completely confident that an MIQ leak from a passenger who arrived on August 7 was the source of the outbreak, ruling out some earlier possible exposure sites that had worried many.
Baker said with level 4 in place there was still a risk from “outliers” – essential workers who might be infected, or rule-breakers.
Many online complained about the time it took the Ministry of Health to upload new places of interest that might keep those essential workers home, with petrol stations associated with the Wellington travellers not identified until Saturday afternoon, about a day after the Ministry knew about the cases.
National's Covid-19 spokesman Chris Bishop said the Government had to avoid “laxness” as “thousands of people are still going to work”.
Ardern expressed some worry about rule-breakers and the essential workers who may have been infected, but said compliance was high thus far.
“One of the things we have learnt from New South Wales is that the virus can keep spreading during lockdown from people going to work or meeting up with people with the virus. This is one of the key reasons their cases keep going up and their lockdown keeps getting extended.”
