New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said the country’s biggest city, Auckland, will go into a seven-day lockdown from early morning on Sunday after a new local case of the coronavirus of unknown origin emerged.
It comes two weeks after Auckland’s nearly 2 million residents were plunged into a snap three-day lockdown when a family of three were diagnosed with the more transmissible UK variant of coronavirus.
Health officials, who could not immediately confirm how the person got infected, said genome sequencing of the new infection was under way. The patient developed symptoms on Tuesday and is regarded as having been potentially infectious since Sunday, officials said. The person visited several public venues during that period.