COVID-19: The Labor government of Jacinda Ardern announced on Sunday, the return of a case of coronavirus in New Zealand
New Zealand health authorities said on Sunday that they had recorded their first local case of the new coronavirus in more than two months. A 56-year-old woman recently returned from Europe tested positive ten days after undergoing a mandatory two-week quarantine. She had observed symptoms of the new coronavirus several days before being tested.
An active search for contact cases was launched, the woman and her husband had spent several days in the Northland region, in the north of the archipelago, when she was potentially contagious. They would have visited about thirty places. Health Minister Chris Hipkins said it was still too early to decide whether full or partial containment should be put in place again. “We do not know the origin or the strain of the infection,” he told a press conference.
25 deaths from Covid-19 only in the archipelago
The woman returned to New Zealand on December 30 after spending four months in Europe, mainly Spain and the Netherlands. She was released on January 13 from the hotel where she had been placed in quarantine in Auckland. New Zealand’s director-general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, said the two tests she underwent during her quarantine had been negative and her husband had not shown any symptoms. Since November 18, the country had not recorded any local case of coronavirus.
Authorities are studying images from CCTV cameras to see if the woman contracted the virus while in quarantine. The more than 600 people who were in the hotel at the same time were asked to self-isolate and get tested again for coronavirus Covid-19. This is the second time in New Zealand that a person returning from abroad has shown symptoms of the new coronavirus after being allowed to leave their quarantine centre. New Zealand has been widely praised for its good management of the pandemic, with a death toll of 25 attributed to Covid-19 and 1,927 confirmed cases out of a total population of some 5 million.
