City new quarantine host
Hamilton is set to host the country's next Covid quarantine centre but the details of where and when haven't been released yet.
The hotel will join others in Auckland, Rotorua and Christchurch in the nation's battle against Covid-19.
Hamilton Mayor Paula Southgate revealed during an online forum with Brazilian mayors that Hamilton had been selected to have a quarantine hotel for New Zealanders arriving from overseas.
‘‘We had a few little errors at a [central] government level around managing quarantine and repatriation of New Zealand citizens, and there was a little burst of Covid and that's how little space it needs to fire off again,'' she said. ‘‘So we've got to do a good job of making sure people who come across our borders go straight into that [Hamilton] hotel and have no chance, zero chance, of infecting anyone else and that's pretty important to me.''
In other Covid developments a new case was confirmed, a quarantine hotel went into lockdown and traffic jams formed around Auckland testing stations.
The newest case was caught at the border: a woman in her 60s who was on a repatriation flight from India on June 18.
The woman was transferred from managed isolation at the Pullman
Hotel to the Jet Park quarantine facility on Tuesday. There are 11 active cases in New Zealand – 10 in Auckland and one in Wellington.
But at least one more is set to be added today, as yesterday’s tally only included cases confirmed up to 9am.
Director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said he was aware of another case at a Rotorua quarantine facility.
People in managed quarantine in Rotorua’s Ibis Hotel have to stay in their rooms until further notice, and were informed by a note under the door.
‘‘This is the facility, I suspect, doing something in response to a positive test,’’ Bloomfield said.
A man in isolation at the hotel told
Stuff they’d just had done three tests, so this may show the system working as it should.
Meanwhile, Kiwis with any symptoms which could point to Covid19 should seek advice on getting a test, Bloomfield said. In Auckland, so many people wanted Covid tests that there were traffic jams and hours of waiting. Queues were so long that Auckland Transport had to divert buses from some stops.
One Aucklander waited two hours and 20 minutes for a test in St Lukes, and said there was a queue waiting for the centre to open at 8am.
Demand for tests has increased since new coronavirus cases were announced after a 24-day Covid-free stretch.
On Tuesday alone, there were 9174 – the highest day of testing since it began.
Since June 16, when two women who travelled from the UK were confirmed as cases, there have been more than 45,000 tests completed in New Zealand.
The spotlight turned on the management of our borders when it was revealed the sisters were given special dispensation to leave isolation after a bereavement, and weren’t tested before driving to Wellington.
Compassionate exemptions were immediately suspended, though it has since been revealed that 50 of the 55 people who’d been granted one were not tested before leaving the facility.
The ministry is following up and 35 of those people have tested negative, however one is ‘‘now not returning contact and has been referred to enforcement’’.
The ministry is also following up with anyone who was near the sisters who returned from the UK, and the 2159 people who left managed isolation in the week from June 9-16.