NZ 'not out of the woods', Bloomfield says while announcing no new community Covid-19 cases today

March 2, 2021

Ashley Bloomfield says today’s update is encouraging, but we’re “not out of the woods” yet.

There are no new Covid-19 cases today linked to the current community outbreak in Auckland, Dr Ashley Bloomfield has confirmed.

The Director-General of Health made the announcement today, which means there are no new community cases of the virus anywhere in the country today.

"The fact there are no new community cases is reassuring, but clearly we are early on in this journey and not our of the woods," Bloomfield said.

"Based on last week's exposure events, which are listed on the locations of interest page on the Ministry's website, we would expect to start seeing any potential positive cases coming through from today onwards."

It comes after two new cases at the weekend, including a 21-year-old South Auckland man - referred to as Case M - who went to a gym session, polytech and food outlets while infectious.

Following the new case, Auckland went into Alert Level 3 on Sunday morning, with the rest of the country moving back up to Level 2.

The current restrictions are for seven days.

There were no new cases of the virus in the community yesterday.

Today, there were four new cases of Covid-19 in managed isolation, all of which were caught on arrival in New Zealand.

Since February 14, when the Auckland February outbreak began, there has been more than 70,000 tests for Covid-19 in the Auckland community.

There were 8880 tests for the virus processed New Zealand yesterday, with most of the swabs taken on Sunday.

Yesterday, there were 7000 swabs taken in Auckland alone, of which 3000 were at community testing stations and 4000 at GP and urgent care centres.

"We do expect high numbers again today and tomorrow just from general testing in the community and as our casual contacts from the earlier Kmart and KFC exposure events come back from their follow up tests," Bloomfield said.

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