Blenheim case a wakeup call

LEADING epidemiologist Prof Sir David Skegg has warned that there could already be a case of Covid19 in Queenstown.

The head of the Government’s Covid19 Public Health Advisory Group said the first SouthIslandcaseinmorethan a year — detected in Blenheim — should be a wakeup call.

‘‘I get very exasperated hearing people saying, ‘Oh, why are we in Alert Level 2?’,’’ he said yesterday.

‘‘The South Island is going to have Covid19.

‘‘There’s no question about that. It’s surprising it hasn’t spread more widely yet.

‘‘I’m in Queenstown right now and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s someone with Covid19 here.’’

The virus was going to turn up throughout New Zealand, Prof Skegg said.

‘‘It’s not going to be a question if the South Island is pure.

‘‘We’re all going to have to face it.’’

Some experts and Act New Zealand leader David Seymour called for testing requirements before people visited the South Island.

So far, there has not been any onward transmission from the Blenheim case, three of the person’s contacts returning negative results, and the same for the hundreds of community tests taken over the weekend.

Covid19 modeller and physicist Dr Dion O’Neale said a case in the South Island could spread undetected more easily than in the North.

‘‘At Alert Level 2 you can do most of your daytoday things.

‘‘You can meet up with a lot of people, and that puts you in an environment where if someone was highly infectious, it could spread quite quickly to a lot of people.’’

An announcement is expected today on the freeing up of managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities to accommodate demand from New Zealanders overseas and from the outbreak in the community.

Covid19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said that the Cabinet was looking closely at MIQ settings in light of fewer cases and more fully vaccinated travellers coming across international borders, even as community cases from the Delta outbreak increased.

He said the changes to MIQ would be announced in the coming days, and implemented ‘‘within weeks’’.

New Zealanders hoping to return from overseas have been struggling with the Government’s MIQ booking system since it was brought in. — RNZ