PM was not misled — Bloomfield
■ 9 new community cases ■ 5 people receiving hospital-level care ■ Source still uncertain
Dr Ashley Bloomfield denied anyone had been misled as nine new confirmed cases of Covid-19 were reported yesterday. Commenting on the testing of border staff, the director general of health said he had communicated frequently with ministers on the matter.
“I was checking every single day. There was clearly a dissonance between what the Prime Minister thought was happening and what was happening on the ground.”
Last week Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gave assurances that borderfacing frontline staff were being tested regularly.
“If you work in our primary quarantine (the Jet Park hotel), you are tested weekly. If you work outside of that, it’s a slightly longer rotation but still frequent,” she said on Thursday.
But that had not been happening, and Health Minister Chris Hipkins has already accepted responsibility for the failure. Asked about her comments last week and who had misled her, Ardern said she would have to check who had compiled the information.
But she said it was unfair to assume Bloomfield had misled her.
The Government’s testing strategy — from June 23 — was for regular testing of asymptomatic borderfacing workers, but Bloomfield yesterday said: “We couldn’t just flick a switch and do that overnight.”
He denied there was any tension between him and the operational arm of the ministry, and there should be a review to make what was happening clearer, and to make “information flows clearer in both directions”.
Seven of the new Covid cases announced yesterday have a confirmed link to the Auckland cluster, while two are believed to be linked to the current outbreak but are still being investigated.
A total of 86 people linked to the cluster, including 36 positive cases, have been moved into a quarantine facility.
Dr Bloomfield said people were being encouraged to move into a quarantine facility where that was helpful, such as families where some had tested positive while others had not.
There are five people receiving hospital-level care. Two are in Auckland City Hospital, and three are in Middlemore.
Bloomfield said he understood they were all stable.
The total number of active cases is 78. Of those, 58 are in the community
cluster and 20 are overseas arrivals. Nationwide, there were 26,014 Covid tests processed yesterday. Almost 100,000 tests were completed in the last week.
Bloomfield said the low number of positive cases with the high number of tests was “reassuring”, and a sign the current outbreak was caught before it could have exploded.
He said the high demands for testing had caused some delays in the testing processing times, but people who tested positive were notified immediately.
Cluster’s origin still unknown
Asked if the current cluster had come from a breach at the quarantine facility, Bloomfield said: “We simply don’t know.”
There was still no link to any of the existing strains of Covid-19 from overseas travellers, though not all of those positive cases were successfully sequenced.
He added the environmental samples from surfaces at the Mt Wellington Americold store — which are viewed as unlikely to have been infectious — had been sent to Wellington for processing. Bloomfield assured supermarket shoppers they did not need to be concerned as there is no evidence people can catch Covid19 from frozen food packaging.
One of the positive cases was a port worker, but that person had been identified through the contact-tracing process and they hadn’t been in contact with anyone at the port.
There was now a testing team in place at the Auckland port while a new team was being set up at Tauranga Port, Bloomfield said.
Testing of all port workers was initially meant to have been completed by last night, but that has been extended to the end of the week due to the sheer number of the 12,000 port workers.
“No one is going to be penalised if no one has had their test by later tonight,” Bloomfield said.
Ports chief executives’ group spokesman Charles Finny said as recently as two weeks ago the maritime sector had been urging health authorities to test at ports, without success.
But Bloomfield rejected the suggestion the Ministry of Health had been deaf to his pleas.
“I have a different view.”
He said there was no plan at this stage to prevent international aircrew from flying home domestically to selfisolate after coming back to New Zealand. Programmes to address anxiety in Ma¯ori and Pasifika communities were being addressed, Bloomfield said, but he didn’t have any details.
“I can also say the 1737 mental health line has people who speak a range of languages.”
Casual contacts
He said the risk was very low for people identified as casual contacts, but he identified other locations around Auckland that positive cases had visited.
On Covid elimination
Bloomfield said the elimination approach “has served us very well, and most commentators, not just here but many abroad, support us maintaining that”.
On extending alert level 2, Bloomfield said the current settings would give Kiwis “pause for thought” about what level 1 should look like, including whether there should be more physical distancing and the possible use of masks in some settings.
“All New Zealanders would prefer that we stayed in alert level 1, and perhaps modify (those settings as they currently are).”
There was clearly a dissonance between what the Prime Minister thought was happening and what was happening on the ground.
Director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield on testing of border staff