Minister plans to step up testing
Clark wants DHBs to monitor population more closely after Covid cases rise to nine
Health Minister David Clark is poised to require district health boards to proactively step up surveillance testing of Covid-19 in the general population.
Influenza normally spikes during winter and allows testing of other infections — which would have included Covid-19.
But because influenza chains of transmission were reduced during lockdown, other ways of surveillance testing have to be found.
Clark is due to release a new testing strategy today for the general population after the number of Covid-19 cases in arrivals increased to nine yesterday.
The number of cases has increased since the policy of testing at day three and 12, which has been in place in place since June 9, has been more rigorously enforced.
Most of the nine current cases were detected from tests in managed isolation and have been shifted to quarantine.
The nine comprise five arrivals from India, two from Pakistan and two from Britain — the latter two being two women given compassionate leave after the death of their mother. They were allowed to drive from Auckland to Wellington without first being tested.
Director general of health Ashley Bloomfield has been repeatedly asked how many of the 55 granted a compassionate exemption between June 9 and June 16 left isolation without being tested but has been unable to answer.
Now, nobody can leave an isolation facility without returning a negative test result, something that has now been more explicitly spelled out in a new Health Order which took effect at midnight last night.
It was previously clear, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.
“Now what we are doing is making it crystal clear.”
Outlining the order, Ardern reiterated the World Health Organisation’s latest descriptions of Covid-19, saying the world was now in a “new dangerous phase”.
She said the current ban on cruise ships would continue from June 30 and she said from then, any shore leave for crew on cargo ships could occur only if they had been at sea for 28 days.
She also said David Clark would be talking to Air New Zealand about crew, currently exempt from isolation requirements, arriving from atrisk countries — and she specifically mentioned flights from Los Angeles.
Ardern does not attribute the higher numbers in Covid-19 cases to lax testing of arrivals during the 24-days of Covid-free cases, but to a doubling in arrivals in the past month and from parts of the world where it is rampant.
Isolation and Quarantine Minister Megan Woods, who appeared with Ardern at the post-Cabinet press conference, said New Zealand has enough hotel capacity for managed isolation and quarantine to cope with the growing number of arrivals.
Capacity was 4607 and there were about 500 spare places at present. More capacity would be found in existing centres, Auckland, Rotorua, Wellington and Christchurch.
The budget for the cost of managed isolation and quarantine to June 30 is $81 million but Woods revealed that a further $298 million had been budgeted for the following six months to December.
Ardern said the Government was looking at the issue of requiring a copaying from arrivals for the cost of isolation.
Meanwhile, National Party deputy leader and Auckland Central MP Nikki Kaye has written to Woods, Clark, Bloomfield and the manager of the Stamford Plaza hotel asking that health agencies and the hotel meet with people living in the 149 apartments in the Stamford Residences about using the Plaza as an isolation facility.
Plans to use the hotel were ditched at the weekend after residents raised concerns about the prospect of any shared spaces but the hotel is understood to have sent a legal letter raising the issue of cost recovery.
Kaye said it was important that residents got clarity on what was happening.