Coronavirus: Death of Invercargill man confirmed as Covid-19 victim, takes toll to 12
Sunday, 19 April 2020
A post-mortem has confirmed that an Invercargill man who died this week, died of coronavirus.
His death brought New Zealand's Covid-19 toll to 12.
Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield announced nine new cases on Sunday afternoon. There were four confirmed cases and five suspected cases.
That brings New Zealand's total number of cases to 1431. Of those, 912 have recovered.
An elderly Invercargill man who died on Tuesday was on Sunday confirmed as a Covid-19 victim. The case, first reported by Stuff, was thought to be the first Covid-19 home death. The person died at home and was cared for by family.
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Tomorrow, Cabinet will make a decision on whether or not to lift the strict level 4 lockdown measures that New Zealand has been living under for nearly four weeks. That announcement will come at 4pm on Monday.
Even if the restrictions were loosened, the country, or parts of it, would only move to alert level 3.
The Government has attempted to manage expectations by conceding that level 3 isn't all that different to level 4.
Most people will continue to work from home and most retail and hospitality businesses will remain shuttered.
Level 3 would however allow non-essential businesses to begin offering deliveries. Take-aways and drive-throughs will also be allowed to open.
'Our emphasis at level 3 moves from 'essential' economic activity to 'safe' economic activity,' said Finance Minister Grant Robertson on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Monday's Cabinet meeting had been brought forward to 10.30am to make the decision.
She will brief the public on the outcome at 4pm on Monday.
Ardern listed the criteria that Ministers would be using to make their decision.
This included making sure Bloomfield was himself satisfied that there was enough data to know that undetected community transmission was unlikely.
She said there also needed to be 'sufficient rigorous and rapid' case identification and contact tracing.
This is an area of particular concern. Bloomfield himself acknowledged that the contact tracing regime New Zealand had at the beginning of the crisis was too localised and not well equipped for the current crisis.
It's been beefed up considerably since then, but whether that's enough remains to be seen.
The Government also wants to make sure measures at the border are working and that the health system has capacity to cope.
Ardern reiterated several times in comments to media that her comments should not be taken to imply that she was leaning one way or the other on the question of lifting the lockdown measures.
The Government has begun to gather data about silent transmission by testing large numbers of people in areas where there have been significant clusters of cases.
Silent transmission is when Covid-19 is passed between people without presenting symptoms. It could infect large numbers of people within a community before it makes itself obvious, and by this point it's often too late to do anything to halt further spread.
Health professionals are testing samples of people in areas close to places where there have been significant clusters of infection to determine whether or not silent transmission has occurred.
In Queenstown, 300 people were tested at supermarkets after a hereford cattle conference sparked an infection cluster there.
All tests returned negative results.
Auckland, Waikato, and Canterbury have also seen sentinel testing. All of the 308 people tested in the Waikato returned negative results.
Not all of the results from the other sentinel testing have been processed yet, but of those that have been, none have been positive.