Ministry of Health Covid-19 update
November 20, 2020
There are three new cases of Covid-19 to report in New Zealand today, all detected in recent returnees in managed isolation. There are no new community cases.
Of these recent returnees:
One person arrived from Romania (via Qatar and Brisbane) on November 3. They were already in our Auckland quarantine facility as a contact of three previously confirmed cases. They returned a positive result to routine day 12 testing.
One person arrived from Dubai on November 15. They returned a positive result to routine day 3 testing and are being transferred to quarantine at our Auckland facility.
One person arrived from Qatar via Brisbane on November 17. They returned a positive result to routine day 3 testing and are being transferred to quarantine at our Auckland facility.
There are no new recovered cases, meaning there are 40 active cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand.
Our total number of confirmed cases is now 1657.
Yesterday our laboratories processed 9292 tests for Covid-19, bringing the total number of tests completed to date to 1,217,383.
This is a good number of daily tests. It reflects the commitment of New Zealanders to getting tested, and also the hard work of those involved in taking and processing the tests.
We continue to encourage anyone who visited a location of interest during the relevant time period for the November cluster to get tested – to ensure we can quickly identify anyone who may have been infected.
As part of this enhanced surveillance we are continuing to have two pop up testing facilities in central and east Auckland. Both locations are walk-in and don’t require a pre-booked appointment.
The central Auckland pop-up testing location is on High Street close to a number of the ‘Locations of interest’ and will be open on Saturday and Sunday. The east Auckland location at 292A Botany Road (Spectrum House) will be open until at least Monday. All testing locations are available on the ARPHS website.
We have the best chance of staying ahead of Covid-19 if everyone who becomes unwell with cold or flu like symptoms stays at home and seeks a test quickly, and all New Zealanders are keeping track of where they’ve been and who they’ve seen.
We have previously established genome linkage between Cases A, B, C, D and E in the Quarantine cluster and will continue our investigation into the epidemiological links. Continued close contact testing around these cases has not identified any further confirmed cases.
NZ Covid Tracer app
NZ Covid Tracer now has 2,374,291 registered users.
Poster scans have reached 120,793,577, and users have created 4,972,947 manual diary entries.
Please continue to use the app to scan into locations displaying a QR code – you never know when you will need to call on your contact tracing diary. The more every person scans, the safer we will all be.
