New Zealand's level 4 lockdown has been extended nationwide until 11.59pm on Tuesday after confirmation the Covid-19 outbreak has spread to Wellington.
ANALYSIS
It may have been unnerving to see the Delta outbreak hitting Wellington yesterday, while potentially hundreds of close contacts popped up all over the South Island.
Three Wellingtonians caught the virus while in Auckland last weekend.
Once they were back in the capital, they could have been spreading thevirus around cafes and restaurants, a pharmacy, a medical centre and four petrol stations before the lockdown started.
But nothing in yesterday's new information was unexpected.
We had already been told about the crowded, indoor locations of interest - like SkyCity Casino at the weekend - which attract people from all over the country who could then take the virus back home.
The only way the South Island might have been moved to alert level 3 today was if the cluster was tiny, the cases were all linked together and to an index case, and they were all in Auckland.
Extending the nationwide lockdown was always the most likely scenario, especially when the types of locations of interest involved became apparent.
There is also still at least one undetected case who was in the community before the lockdown started: the link between the border case and anyone in the 31-strong cluster.
Don't be surprised if case numbers shoot up in coming days.
Contacts are generally asked to be tested five days after they were at a location of interest, which is when they are most likely to test positive if they have caught the virus.
That means anyone who caught it while at SkyCity last weekend has probably only just got tested, with results coming back the following day.
A huge number of such cases surfacing would be alarming, as many of them would have been potentially infectious in the community for two to three days before the lockdown started.
But they wouldn't necessarily push the lockdown timetable any further back, because they would all be linked to the existing cluster.
The real curveball would a new case, or cases, with no link at all, which would indicate an undetected chain of transmission.
While 12 of the current cases are still being investigated for a link to the cluster, director general of health Ashley Bloomfield seems very confident they are all likely to be linked.
He was much less open about advising Cabinet ministers that Auckland should stay in level 4 lockdown until the end of August, based on all the current information.
But under questioning, he did not dispute this.
A move to level 3 for the South Island in the middle of next week is still on the cards, if there are no cases amid widespread community testing in the coming days.
By then the southerners who were at locations of interest in Auckland and the Coromandel should also know the results of their day-five tests.
And a much more important indicator will also be available: we should start to see whether lockdown restrictions are translating into a tailing-off in daily case numbers.
