New Zealand fighting resurgence of the virus
SYDNEY — As last week began, New Zealanders were celebrating 100 days without community spread of the coronavirus, drinking at pubs, packing stadiums and hugging friends.
Two days later, that suddenly changed: Four new cases, all related, emerged in Auckland. On Thursday, officials said the cluster had grown to 17, as they struggled to map out how the virus had returned to an isolated island nation championed for its pandemic response.
One theory is that it could have come through cargo. Some of the infected New Zealanders worked at a cold storage warehouse with imported food. Another focus is quarantine facilities for returning travelers, the source of an outbreak tearing through Melbourne, Australia.
A mystery and a few cases — that’s all it took for New Zealand to say goodbye to normalcy. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern immediately announced a new lockdown for Auckland, a city of 1.7 million people, along with a huge testing, contact tracing and quarantine blitz that aims to quash COVID-19 for the second time.
Many other places have faced a similar challenge — Hong Kong, Australia and Vietnam have all confronted new waves after early triumphs. New Zealand, while disappointed by the abrupt resurgence, has reacted with an extraordinary level of urgency and action that it hopes will be a model for how to eliminate a burst of infection and rapidly get on with life.
“We were totally back to hugging, handshaking, restaurants, cinemas — all the stuff apart from going on holiday overseas,” said Siouxsie Wiles, a microbiologist at the University of Auckland. “What we’ve had time to do in the meantime is massively ramp up our testing and contact tracing, so this is going to be a real test of how quickly you can stamp it out again.”
Ms. Ardern first heard about a potential positive case at 4 p.m. Tuesday while traveling in a van a few hours outside the capital, Wellington, after visiting a factory that makes face masks. At 9:15 p.m., she and Dr. Ashley Bloomfield, the director-general of health, appeared at a news conference where they announced the new cases — all four were from the same family; none had recently returned from overseas — and a lockdown that would start the following day.
“We have come too far to go backwards,” Ms. Ardern said. “Be strong and be kind.”
The lockdown was initially set for three days. Contact tracing had already begun.
Michael Baker, an epidemiologist who was a leading proponent of New Zealand’s forceful efforts to eliminate the virus during its initial outbreak months ago, said he heard about the new cases a few hours before the announcement. Like many others, he immediately started trying to work out what had gone wrong.
“The only way a virus can appear in the community in New Zealand is via the borders,” he said. “It’s been eliminated in New Zealand. There is really no chance it was persisting for the last three months without it being detected.”
But which border, how and when? No one yet knows.
To investigate the unproven idea of a spread through cargo, health officials have tested everyone at Americold, the cold storage company where some of the first cases appeared, with fast-tracked results identifying a total of seven workers with the virus.
If the virus is found to have moved through freight, the consequences could be significant for global trade. It could mean deep cleaning and lengthier wait times between shipment and delivery, along with more monitoring on ships and in ports.
But epidemiologists said such transmission was improbable: human-to-human contact was the most likely source.
The cluster’s growth so far points to a path through kitchens and break rooms. One of the new infections reported Thursday involved a student related to a person identified Tuesday. Another seven are family members of Americold employees.
All of those newly infected will be placed in government quarantine facilities.
New Zealand has apparently learned what not to do from its neighbor and rival Australia, where 800 people who had tested positive in Melbourne were recently found not to be at home during random checks of selfisolation.
Australia’s missteps have also led New Zealand to focus on quarantine facilities — in Melbourne, the virus moved from travelers to hotel workers, who then carried it home.
Bloomfield said Thursday that workers at all 32 quarantine facilities that handle returning travelers would be tested for the virus this week, and once a week after that. Relatives of the workers may also be tested, along with every border official at New Zealand’s airports and other ports — between 6,000 and 7,000 federal employees.
“It will help us avoid any further and inadvertent spread into the community,” Dr. Bloomfield said.