Covid 19 coronavirus: Auckland lockdown won't lift yet - alert levels reviewed on Monday

Auckland will remain in level 3 lockdown for now, and Cabinet will reassess the alert levels on Monday.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made the announcement in today's Covid-19 media briefing, after Cabinet reviewed the matter this morning.

Auckland went into level 3 lockdown and the rest of New Zealand into level 2 at 12pm on Wednesday last week. The restrictions are in place until 11.59pm next Wednesday, but there are suggestions Auckland might come out of level 3 several days earlier. A higher, level 4 lockdown has been ruled out.

Cabinet today also considered the latest health information about the cluster, contact tracing capacity, results from the surge of testing and whether any new cases are existing contacts, or if they're new.

But in today's briefing Ardern said New Zealand needed to "stay the course" and stick with the current levels.

"We are where we are because of the efforts of everyone, but especially Auckland and especially those who have been tested," she said.

Ardern pointed to large shops and workplaces and a number of churches that have since turned out positive Covid-19 test results.

"Imagine how much bigger that cluster and outbreak would be if all of those places hadn't closed ... it could have been enormous.

"I want to say thank you Auckland, you have made a huge difference to our containment efforts."

When Cabinet reassesses the alert levels on Monday, it will consider eight factors. The four key factors are trends in transmission, capacity and capability of contact tracing, the effectiveness of isolation and border controls, and the capacity of the health system to move into different alert levels.

The other factors include the economic impact, the risk to the population, whether people have been following the rules, and the ability to move easily into other levels.

Director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said it was not necessarily the number of new cases each day that affected whether Auckland should move down a level, but rather the pattern of the new cases.

He said all of today's nine cases related to the Auckland cluster were expected cases among people who were already in isolation and who had been identified through contact tracing.

Ardern said future outbreaks might not necessarily mean a move to level 3 or 4, depending on the nature of the case.

She urged Aucklanders to continue sticking to the rules, stay home in their bubbles, and cover their faces when leaving the house.

"Stay the course, short and sharp, hard and early - we've done this before and we can do it again."

Cabinet's review comes as one of the big guns called in to review and fix the border patrol response, Sir Brian Roche, said he felt New Zealanders might have lost a sense of perspective on how well the country had responded to Covid over the past months.

"We are the envy of the world. We seem to want to beat ourselves up for every infringement, and as a citizen I find that surprising," Roche told Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking.

Asked by Hosking why tests on border workers hadn't been happening, as expected, Roche said that was the "very elusive" question.

"Everyone's acknowledged that what they thought was happening, didn't. So there has to be an intervention to remedy that and I'm part of the intervention."

He urged perspective. "A mistake was made, there's a lot of moving parts, a lot of risk. No one goes to work to make a mistake; we shouldn't overstate it. There have been mistakes made. There have been some mis-communications - let's just simplify it, sort it out and move on."