Covid 19 coronavirus: Auckland's cluster grows as election campaigning starts in earnest

New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern in a mask. Photo / Pool

MPs were donning their masks and practising social distancing on their first proper day of campaigning on the road in the "Covid election".

As both major parties were announcing new election policies, the Ministry of Health advised there were four new cases of Covid-19 yesterday.

Two were in the community and two in managed isolation.

In a statement from the Ministry of Health, officials said both community cases yesterday were linked to the Auckland cluster.

That cluster now has 161 people linked to it.

Of the new community cases, one was a close contact of an existing confirmed case linked to the cluster, and the other was a confirmed case linked to the Mt Roskill evangelical Church sub-cluster.

Both were already in isolation.

With the four additional cases yesterday, the total number of active cases in New Zealand is 118. Of those, 41 are imported cases at managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities, and 77 are community cases.

Since August 11, the ministry's contact tracing team has identified 3,224 close contacts of cases, of which 3199 have been contacted and are self-isolating.

Officials are in the process of contacting the rest.

Both of yesterday's new imported cases arrived from India on August 23 and are the 16th and 17th person on an Air India flight on that day to test positive for Covid-19.

One was a boy under the age of 4, and the other was a woman in her 20s.

The health ministry said the most recent positive cases were close contacts of previous confirmed cases.

To date, all cases have been detected in managed isolation and quarantine facilities.

There are four people around New Zealand in hospital with Covid-19. Three are in a stable condition, and one is in Waikato Hospital ICU.

This comes as number of Covid-19 tests in New Zealand nears the 820,000 mark.

Just under 4000 tests were completed yesterday.

The uptake of the Covid-19 tracer app is continuing to increase.

There are now 2,139,000 registered users and 359,393 posters have been created. The app has recorded 43,433,462 poster scans, and 2,477,964 manual diary entries.

In Rotorua, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her entourage of MPs, staff and security were all wearing masks for part of the time they were in the region.

Along her campaign stops, Ardern has a focus on the rebuilding of the tourism sector amid the economic fallout of Covid-19.

This was one of the reasons she announced that, if elected, Labour would make Matariki a public holiday.

Her argument was that it would encourage people to travel around the country, bolstering local tourism.

But the policy wouldn't come into effect until 2022.