Jacinda Ardern says New Zealand's Covid-19 Delta outbreak hasn't peaked yet as she expects community cases to continue to rise.
Appearing on Breakfast on Tuesday morning, the Prime Minister couldn’t say if there were any new cases to report from overnight.
“The suggestion was early on that it would take between eight and 10 days before we would see potentially those cases peak, so we do expect them to continue to be high and keep going up until we see them fall away.
“Part of that is because the cases we are finding, they were people who were infected before the lockdown and so that’s why you keep seeing those new locations of interest, but that should start to fall away as well.”
As of Tuesday morning, there are more than 400 locations of interest on the Ministry of Health's website .
The Prime Minister says she expects cases to rise before they begin to fall.
"People will probably be observing that there's more locations of interest and there's more contacts, over 14,000 people, than we've had with previous outbreaks," Ardern said.
"That's because when Delta really changed the game with Covid-19 we changed our way of working.
"So in response to it being more infectious and the fact that we believe there's probably a shorter timeframe from between when someone's exposed to it and when they may infect others that's why, instead of what we used to do before which is when we found a Covid case we'd interview that person and we'd say 'literally who is around you? Who are your flatmates? Your household members? Who do you work alongside?'
"Instead now we're just saying 'where have you been?' and treating everyone within those sites as someone that we need to be concerned about so that's one reason you're seeing that big change."
Ardern said there were higher rates of households being infected with Delta compared to previous Covid-19 outbreaks.
She said that's why this time around more people were being tested, as well as there being higher alert levels in place.
Ardern's comments come after she announced on Monday that Auckland would remain at Alert Level 4 until at least 11.59pm next Tuesday, and the rest of New Zealand at Level 4 until at least 11.59pm this Friday.
"I think everyone is Auckland fully expected that or anticipated that that would be likely so we thought let's just give everyone that certainty," she said.
"Beyond that we genuinely will look at everything that's happening with the outbreak, whether or not the new cases that we're identifying are people who are already in isolation, and so on. All of that matters for our decision making so really we will literally make that decision [on the next alert level move] as that information gets closer to that date and as we meet next Monday as a Cabinet."
Monday’s new 35 community virus cases tipped the total number in this outbreak over 100, with 107 in total.
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