The nation\u2019s largest city was put into lockdown on Sunday after three unexplained cases were found in the community
\nnews agency
\nWELLINGTON
\nA lockdown in the New Zealand city of Auckland will end at midnight, the government announced Wednesday after concluding a coronavirus outbreak had been contained.
\n\u201cThis is good news,\u201d Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.
\nThe nation\u2019s largest city was put into lockdown on Sunday after three unexplained cases were found in the community. It was the first lockdown in six months in a nation which so far has managed to successfully stamp out the spread of the disease.
\nThe move to end the lockdown came as health authorities said the outbreak had grown by three cases to six in total. But Ardern said the additional cases were to be expected because they involved close contacts.
\nRamped-up testing indicates the outbreak hasn\u2019t spread far. Laboratories processed more than 17,000 individual tests on Tuesday, authorities said, and they also tested wastewater samples, which came back negative.
\n\u201cWhat this tells us is that we don\u2019t have a widespread outbreak, but rather a small chain of transmission which is manageable by our normal contact-tracing and testing procedures,\u201d Ardern said.
\nThe initial cases were a mother, a father, and their 13-year-old daughter, who attends a local high school. Health authorities said the three new cases were a high school classmate, who was a close contact of the daughter, and two family members of the classmate.
\nSenior lawmakers in the Cabinet who met Wednesday afternoon decided most Aucklanders could go back to work and school from Thursday, but they would still leave some restrictions in place until at least Monday.
\nGenome testing has shown the family caught a more contagious variant first found in Britain.
\nThe mother who caught the disease works at a catering company that does laundry for airlines. Officials have been investigating whether there is any link to infected passengers, but so far haven\u2019t been able to find a direct connection or explain how the outbreak might have begun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The nation\u2019s largest city was put into lockdown on Sunday after three unexplained cases were found in the community news agency WELLINGTON A lockdown in the New Zealand city of Auckland will end at midnight, the government announced Wednesday after concluding a coronavirus outbreak had been contained. \u201cThis is good news,\u201d Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-175178","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n