Alert Levels

Rest of New Zealand to stay at L2 until this time.

Auckland will step down from L3 to L2 on Sunday.

From midnight Sunday, schools, hospitality etc will be able to reopen, but we will keep limit on gatherings.

Gatherings limited to 10 people, except funerals and tangihanga will have a limit of 50.

We will review these settings on Sunday 6th September

Face Mask Mandate

Masks are mandated on public transport in Level 2 or above from Monday

General Update

Cases will continue from this cluster for some time to come.

We have tested 194000 New Zealanders, 100,000 Aucklanders. More than 25% of all testing for COVID has taken place since since the beginning of the year.

Contact tracing, we are achieving the gold standard of 80% in 48 hours. We are getting ahead of the virus and finding people and getting them into isolation before they’re symptomatic.

Remarkable effort of the Auckland public health unit. Brian Roche said he found watching them a humbling experience.

The cases we have seen over the past two weeks occurred before we we went into Level 3. If it weren’t for level 3 this cluster would be exponential. This is a contained cluster but is our biggest one. Our tail will be long and cases will keep coming for a while to come.

Need to feel confident we have the perimiter well defined.