Two new coronavirus cases including one young child, ministry confirms
Sunday, 21 June 2020
There are two new confirmed cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand.
They have both been caught at managed isolation facilities and neither involves community transmission. It brings the total number of active cases to seven. None are receiving hospital-level care.
One of the cases is related to the two cases announced on Saturday. Those two cases were a couple who arrived on a repatriation flight from India. Sunday's case is their young child, who the Ministry of Health says is under two years old.
The Ministry of Health says that all three are 'doing well' at the Jet Park hotel quarantine facility.
The other case is a 59-year-old woman who also arrived from Delhi. She was tested at the Grand Millennium managed isolation facility. She is now in quarantine at the Jet Park hotel along with her partner who has also been tested. The results of that test are yet to come back.
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The Ministry of Health says it is following up on the case and will provide an update on Monday.
The woman was tested on her third day of managed isolation as part of the new testing regime. The Ministry of Health says this 'is an example of the new testing regime working as it should'.
Everyone staying at the Grant Millennium while the couple was there has either already been tested or will be tested as part of the new scheme to test people on their third and twelfth day of managed isolation.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said the country was always expecting to get new cases at the border as Kiwis return home from overseas.
'It is good that the systems are in place to detect these cases. Testing, particularly at the border, will continue to be an important part of our Covid-19 response,' Bloomfield said.
There were 5,950 tests completed yesterday, bringing the total to 341,117. This was 'a very high' number of tests for a Saturday, Bloomfield said.
The Ministry also delivered an update on the other cases announced this week. It said that 386 contacts of the pair who had arrived from the UK had been followed up. Of those, 288 had tested negative and 25 people were yet to be contacted.
For the case that had arrived from Pakistan, 207 contacts had been identified for a follow up. Of those, 25 people have been tested, with 15 negative test results to date. This doesn't capture the total number of tests performed in relation to this case, as many of the contacts of that person had already been tested as part of managed isolation rules. A further 177 people will be captured by testing around day 12 in the managed isolation facility. To date, 94 of these people have been tested.
The update came at the end of a difficult week for the ministry after two people who had been granted a compassionate exemption from managed isolation tested positive for Covid-19. The pair had driven from Auckland to Wellington, which risked spreading the virus further.
This week's crisis at the border has forced a shake-up of managed isolation facilities. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Air Commodore Darryn Webb had been promoted to oversee the running of the facilities.
He immediately commissioned a review of how they had been running, which will come back next week.
Webb and Housing Minister Megan Woods, who is now in charge of the isolation facilities will themselves deliver an update at 4pm on Sunday.