Healths officials are racing to trace the movements and close contacts of visitor who toured New Zealand capital last weekend
The Australian visitor who had coronavirus visited Wellington from Sydney last weekend. The New Zealand capital faces a potential lockdown. Photograph: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images
New Zealand is racing to track the in-country movements of a tourist with Covid-19 who tested positive on their return to Australia, with the possibility of a lockdown of the capital, Wellington, not ruled out.
The traveller spent a weekend visiting Wellington from Sydney, and visited a number of sites around the city, including popular tourism spot Te Papa, the national museum. At this stage, it is assumed they caught coronavirus in Sydney before travelling.
Four close contacts have already been identified and are isolating, the ministry of health said.
New Zealand officials have released an initial list of six locations of interest in Wellington, and those who have visited them at the listed times are being told to get tested and self-isolate. So far they include a pub, a pharmacy, a hotel, and the museum, all in the inner city.
Officials have not ruled out a possible lockdown for the city if community cases emerge, or other measures including mask mandates and restrictions on public gathering.
Speaking to Radio New Zealand on Wednesday morning, the director general of health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, said: “Everything’s on the table,” he said. “It’s proven useful in the past for us to not rule anything out.”
Bloomfield said that at this stage, officials were assuming the case was the more infectious Delta variant.
Dr Siouxsie Wiles, one of the key communicators of New Zealand’s Covid response, said in a series of tweets: “Looks like we might need to brace ourselves for some Covid-19 cases after a travel bubble leak.”
“Don’t panic. But do take this seriously, and that means everyone even if you don’t live in Wellington,” she said, urging people to consider wearing masks while out and about, and to stay home if they experienced any symptoms. “The sooner we identify people with the virus, the sooner we can break any chains of transmission, the less likely we will need to move up the alert levels if the virus has got into the community here,” she said.
No one in New Zealand has yet tested positive. If they do, it would break a more than 100-day streak of no Covid cases in the community. On Wednesday morning, the Ministry of Health released a statement saying: “This is the first time an Australian traveller has brought Covid-19 to NZ, and since gone home.”
On Tuesday evening, New Zealand announced that its quarantine-free travel bubble with New South Wales would pause, due to the outbreak of cases in the community in Sydney. A release from health officials said the pause would last an initial 72 hours, and be under “constant review”.
The passenger flew from Sydney to Wellington on 19 June, and flew back on 21 June. They tested positive on their return. Full up-to-date details of which sites they visited, and what you should do if you also visited a location of interest are available on the Ministry of Health website.
The ministry asked Wellingtonians to “Please remain vigilant and stick to the basics: stay home if unwell and get advice about having a test, wash hands regularly, cough and sneeze into the elbow, wear masks or face coverings on all public transport, and keep track of where you’ve been”.
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