New Zealand needs to retain its current Covid-19 alert levels, the Prime Minister announced today after Cabinet met to review the restrictions.
"There is nothing to suggest we need to change our course and nothing that suggests we need to escalate our response, but at this stage we need to stay the course and retain the setting we have for now," Jacinda Ardern said at the daily 1pm press conference.
Nine new Covid-19 cases were recorded in the community today with two other new cases from returnees.
"We have made good progress," Ms Ardern said of the Covid-19 resurgence plan, launched after a community-based outbreak in Auckland last week.
"We are not dealing with multiple outbreaks. We can pin point with much more precision whom has infected whom and that helps us to isolate those we need to."
Ms Ardern said the Alert Level 3 restrictions contributed to that.
"We are stopping other people from being infected ... and it also tells us we are getting in front of the virus.
"There are however, a small handful of cases that hasn't been the case, where symptoms rather than contact tracing has caused someone to get a test."
Ms Ardern said that was "not ideal ... but this is where our Level 3 restrictions have been so key" and it was critical the current rules are followed.
A decision on whether alert levels will shift is set for Monday, August 24.
Auckland has been under Alert Level 3 and the rest of the country under Level 2 since August 12 - with the Prime Minister saying last week those levels would remain until August 26.
Cabinet met today to review the progress made on the Auckland cluster, relying on information "right up to the hour before" they met.
Yesterday, Health Minister Chris Hipkins said the review would look at what they know about the cluster, the contact tracing around the cluster, test results across the community and the results of testing from the border.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said a key aspect to factor in when considering alert levels was the amount of testing around the rest of the country, to give a picture of whether Covid-19 had spread outside Auckland.
"The other piece of information that we have to report to Cabinet is, are we confident our lab capacity and our contact tracing capacity are in good shape?"
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