Nelson case still under investigation

The case of a Nelson supermarket worker who tested positive for coronavirus more than four weeks after travelling home from the Cook Islands is still under investigation, but health officials say there is no evidence of community transmission.

Director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield was asked at a press conference on Monday how many cases were still being investigated for possible community transmission.

He said there was an ‘‘explanation related to overseas travel from some time ago’’ for the most recent Nelson case, along with another confirmed through surveillance testing at Auckland Airport.

‘‘It is likely that the late positive test reflects the fact that these people had been infected and there were still fragments of the virus that showed up on the test but it doesn’t necessarily mean they were infectious,’’ Bloomfield said.

Bloomfield said ‘‘more importantly’’ the people close to those two cases had been tested, with no further positive results.

A Nelson woman in her 30s, an essential worker at New World in Stoke, was confirmed as the region’s first new case of Covid-19 for three weeks on April 30. Prior to that no new cases had been reported since April 9.

Bloomfield was also asked if contact tracing was under way in the Cook Islands, given the most recent Nelson case had travelled there, to mitigate any panic in the Pacific nation.

‘‘What’s not clear is whether that infection might have happened as part of the travel back from the Cooks – in fact it is very unlikely because the Cooks has not had any cases, but whether it happened in another setting during the period after that person arrived back, that is more likely.’’

Cook Islands News reported that Prime Minister Henry Puna said 1300 people had been swabbed and tested for Covid-19 in Cook Islands – and all those tests had come back negative.