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Air NZ crew member with Covid-19 had recently been vaccinated, Ardern reveals

March 8, 2021

The Air New Zealand crew member tested positive on March 7 after returning from Japan.

New Zealand's latest Covid-19 case, an Air New Zealand crew member, had only just received a vaccination for the virus before becoming infected, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says.

The crew member, who returned to New Zealand from Japan on February 28, tested positive for Covid-19 yesterday. The person had previously tested negative upon returning home.

They had a swab taken on Saturday as part of routine surveillance testing, and they were moved to Auckland’s quarantine facility yesterday after the test result was returned, the Ministry of Health said in a statement last night.

Their household contacts have tested negative.

The crew member returned a positive test result during routine testing yesterday.

There is currently one location of interest – the Auckland Airport Countdown, which closed for cleaning overnight.

The case visited the supermarket on March 3 between 12.07pm and 1.22pm.

Others who visited the supermarket at the time are considered casual contacts. They are advised to monitor their health until March 17, and if they develop any Covid-19 symptoms to contact Healthline, get tested and stay home until they get a negative test result.

This morning on Breakfast, Ardern said the crew member was one of more than 9000 border and managed isolation and quarantine staff to have already been vaccinated against the virus, but the jab hadn't had time to take affect.

"This person had only just been vaccinated, so they were a priority for this exact reason," she said.

"The issue being, of course, that the vaccine takes a couple of weeks to work so at this point it wasn't quite doing its job and nor would we have expected it to, but it does demonstrate this person was indeed a priority for us."

The Covid-19 Response Minister says a new phase of the rollout will start next week.

Genome sequencing for the new case is expected in the next 24 hours, but Ardern said it was likely they caught the coronavirus through their job.

"As circumstances change in different places [countries] we look at whether or not we need to be heightening what we're doing," she said.

"For this particular person, for the routes they were travelling, they were regularly tested — we have tests for this individual on the 22nd, on the 28th and then on the 6th — they obviously wear PPE as part of their job, if they are requiring accommodation in the site they were staying they're not allowed to leave, they're not allowed to have contact with any other people.

"So they do have quite tight protocols around them."

There are stronger restrictions for high-risk countries, like the US, where air crew are ordered to isolate for 48 hours after they return to their family home. But this was not the case for yesterday's Covid-19 case.

Ardern said officials are now working through whether or not they need to "up the ante" on other countries too.

Meanwhile, Ardern couldn't say if there were any new Covid-19 cases overnight as she doesn't get numbers until later in the morning.

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