Covid 19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins and Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield gave more details at a press conference at the Beehive at 4pm today.
If positives cases started turning up and there was no clear link to somebody in quarantine, that would lead to a lockdown, Gorman said.
He said officials would be "scrambling" to test all contacts.
"What they need to do now in Northland is to encourage widespread community testing, just to make sure there aren't any other cases.
"What's required now is not only to test the people who have been in direct contact like family members and so on, but also to start encouraging people to turn up and be tested en masse.
"So that in fact there can be some reassurance that there aren't other cases in the community."
Covid-19 modeller Professor Michael Plank said it was possible the virus may have been passed from an infected person to another in a MIQ facility.
"One of the risks we've always been aware of is someone arrives with the virus, but then they pass it on to someone else in quarantine, perhaps near the end of their stay," said Plank, of the University of Canterbury and Te Punaha Matatini.
"That's one possible way the virus can leak out. I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, but it's a possibility, because it would be unlikely for someone to be incubating the virus for that length of time."
Plank said contact tracers would be racing to find all of the close contacts that may have been exposed - and any other linked cases would hopefully be revealed over the next few days.
