New Zealand has returned to lockdown in its first case of a delta variant
EFE.- New Zealand, where more than 5 million of its residents returned to confinement when a case of Covid-19 was reported, is facing its first outbreak with the delta variant, which since this morning has accumulated ten cases of local infection.
Last night’s results (from closing) confirmed that it is a delta variant and that it is linked, through genetic sequencing, to infection from the NSW outbreak (“The epicenter of the third wave of Covid-19 is in New Zealand,” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told reporters in Wellington.
New Zealand’s president, who has been praised around the world for her management against Covid-19, had decreed the day before the three-day confinement of more than 5 million of the country’s residents, despite those living in Auckland and Adjacent to the Coromandel Peninsula They will go through this process for seven days.
This strict and early measure was adopted by New Zealand regarding the confinement of its residents after an Auckland resident, who traveled to Coromandel over the weekend, was found to have contracted Covid-19.
Since then, New Zealand has reported nine more infections, including a person working in a hospital in Auckland, which has a population of 1.7 million and is the most populous city in the peripheral country, although Experts believe that between 50 and 120 people would have been infected prior to confinement.
On this day, New Zealand police reported three small protests against confinement measures in Auckland, Tauranga and Nelson, which resulted in eight arrests.
It may interest you: Fauci predicts that the US will not return to lockdown despite the risks of delta variables
The Cook Islands government has halted for 72 hours its quarantine-free travel bubble with New Zealand, which has collected 2,580 confirmed and 56 more probable cases of Covid-19, including 26 deaths and quarantine of active cases, nearly all of them in quarantine centres.
Authorities in New Zealand accelerated the vaccination campaign last weekWhich began last February with border workers and began vaccinating doses of Pfizer for the general population of more than 5 million people at the end of July.
The executive intends to end vaccination before the end of the year to reopen its borders, which closed in March 2020, starting in the first quarter of 2021 through an individual plan that weighs the risks of the international traveler’s country of origin and their immunization status.