"It looks like we may have gotten away with it" - that's the message from microbiologist Dr Siouxie Wiles, who says Auckland may have been lucky enough to avoid a Covid-19 super spreader event after a positive case was infectious in the community for around a week.
Auckland was put into Alert Level 3 on Sunday morning, with the rest of the country moved to Level 2. Cabinet is meeting to review the country's restrictions today.
Earlier in the week Wiles said she was concerned after the 21-year-old man, known as Case M in the Auckland February cluster, was confirmed with the virus on Saturday.
On Saturday evening, Case M's locations of interest were sent out by the Ministry of Health.
His positive test came after he visited City Fitness in Papatoetoe on February 20 and 26, as well as Manukau Institute of Technology and multiple food outlets throughout last week.
While there are still test results pending for several people at those exposure events, there has been no spread as of yet.
The news comes as a decision on whether Auckland will move out of Alert Level 3 is expected today.
"Now we've had a string days of no new cases and I think what gives us confidence of is that there hasn't been a huge number of infections from those events," Wiles told Breakfast.
"It looks like we may have got away with it which is such a relief.
"But we aren't through the 14 day period yet, there is an incubation period and so we may still see cases but it shouldn't be what it could have been had there been these large scale transmission events."
Covid-19 modeller Professor Shaun Hendy urged Kiwis to stay vigilant.
"What ever the decision is later today, we'll need to stay vigilant next week, we actually need to stay vigilant for the rest of the year," he told Breakfast.
"We're dealing with this virus, it's at our borders and there's always the chance of transmission through one of our MIQ facilities or somewhere in our border facilities."
There's still test results expected from Case M's contacts, but Hendy said he thinks Cabinet will strongly lean towards shifting levels down if they come back negative.
"The evidence pointing towards the fact that we've contained it, we just have to look back, though, a couple of weeks where it just took that one interaction that we didn't know about to spread to this second family."
Case M's mum, known as Case N, tested positive after her son was confirmed with the illness. It was later revealed she caught the illness after going on a walk with a woman from another family with Covid-positive cases while they were meant to be isolating under Alert Level 3.
However, Wiles added that Kiwis needed to be "very mindful that we aren't throwing stones at everybody, that we aren't taking a punitive approach" which hasn't worked overseas.
"People make mistakes and they really need to feel confident that when they come forward, or that they will come forward, because when we start to vilify people for making mistakes then people are not going to come forward and get tested and then that's a big problem for us."
On Sunday, Case O in the Auckland February cluster was announced, but that case was already in quarantine throughout their infectious period.
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