There have been no new community cases overnight, making Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins “optimistic” that Cabinet will decide to lift Auckland’s lockdown later this afternoon.
Hipkins confirmed the news on Breakfast, with Auckland scheduled to potentially end its three-day stint at Alert Level 3 at 11.59pm tonight, with the rest of New Zealand at level 2.
Cabinet is meeting this afternoon before a 4.30pm announcement on whether that will be extended.
Hipkins described the latest negative tests as "hopeful".
“That’s a good way to start the day,” he said.
The minister was asked on Breakfast if the latest developments mean an end to Auckland's lockdown is likely.
"At this point I'm optimistic,” he said, before making an effort to temper expectations. "But there's still water to flow under the bridge today.
“We’ll get a lot of information in the early part of the early morning which will be all of our overnight testing results. We’ll get a lot more information from how our contact tracing processes have been going and from that source investigation, which is very important.”
Hipkins said a number of factors would weigh into Cabinet’s decision this afternoon.
“In big picture terms, we look at whether there have been new cases. If there are any new cases, are they connected? Are they close contacts that we’ve already identified, tested and isolated or are there cases coming from elsewhere?
"In the August outbreak, for example, we also had a 72-hour lockdown to begin with and we found that within that period of time we had identified several new cases where the links weren’t clear. Things then snowballed from there and we picked up a number of additional cases.
“That cluster ended up being over 100. In this case, that hasn’t happened, which is really, really encouraging at this point.”
Test results from the close contacts of the year 9 student at Papatoetoe High School, one of three family members to contract the UK variant, are being processed as a priority.
“The close contacts there [Papatoetoe High School] are given a special code when they get their test. That means their test, when they get to the lab, they get processed first.
"For close contacts, for people we are really in a hurry to get results for, the labs have a way of coding those test swabs so they get processed quickly and we get the results as quickly as we can.”
Hipkins didn’t have the latest numbers of test results from the high school that had been processed.
“We were still in the minority [of close contact test results at the high school] late yesterday but a significant number of them are likely to have been processed overnight.”
As well as case numbers from close contacts, the latest round of tests on border workers and the probe into the source of the outbreak will also play a role in Cabinet’s decision making, Hipkins said.
“We still don’t know the source of this case and that’s one of the pieces of the puzzle that’s a bit frustrating, so anything that might help us identify the source, we want to see the test results from there,” he said.
“Any chains of transmission we might be missing links in, we look for results in that kind of space.”
Thus far, genome sequencing had not shown links to any recent cases at New Zealand’s border.
“If you go further back, there are cases that are close, but they’re not an exact match, but we’re heading back some time to find those,” Hipkins said.
“Therefore, the likelihood that there has been transmission of those cases for at least a month without that being detected is pretty unlikely.”
Hipkins said another unlikely scenario is the mother contracting the virus from the laundry of international passengers or aircrew at her workplace.
“The reality is we’re dealing with a lot of highly unlikely scenarios here and one of the scenarios is that it could have come off some laundry from someone who was either a transit passenger or an international aircrew member — again, highly unlikely but a possibility.”
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