Nine new confirmed cases of Covid-19 were reported today, all from the Auckland cluster.
Seven of them have a confirmed link to the cluster, while two are believed to be linked to the cluster but are still being investigated.
Meanwhile 86 people linked to the cluster, including 36 positive cases, have been moved into a quarantine facility.
Director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said people were being encouraged to move into a quarantine facility where that was helpful, such as families where some had tested positive while others had not.
There are five people receiving hospital-level care. Two are in Auckland City Hospital, and three are in Middlemore.
He said he understood the five people in hospital were stable.
The total number of active cases is 78. Of those, 58 are in the community cluster and 20 are overseas arrivals that have been contained in quarantine or managed isolation since they flew in.
There were 26,014 tests processed yesterday. Almost 100,000 tests were completed in the last week.
Bloomfield said the low number of positive cases with the high number of tests was "reassuring", and a sign that the current outbreak was caught before it coudl have exploded.
He said the high demands for testing had caused some delays in the testing processing times, but people who tested positive were notified immediately.
No failure to test border-facing workers - Bloomfield
Last week Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gave assurances that border-facing frontline staff were being tested regularly.
"If you work in our primary quarantine (the Jet Park), you are tested weekly. If you work outside of that, it's a slightly longer rotation but still frequent," she said on Thursday.
But that had not been happening, for which Health Minister Chris Hipkins has already accepted responsibility.
Asked about her comments last week and who had misled her, Ardern said she would have to check who had compiled the information.
But she said it was unfair to assume Bloomfield had misled her.
"When we ask as a Cabinet for something to happen, we expect it to happen. That has not met our expectations," Ardern said.
But Bloomfield said no one had been misled and he had communicated frequently with ministers about testing border-facing workers.
"I was checking every single day. There was clearly a dissonance between what the Prime Minister thought was happening and what was happening on the ground."
He said testing was being rolled out for staff at managed isolation and quarantine facilities.
"We were increasing the frequency of that testing."
He didn't know when testing of workers at the Jet Park had started, but it was in the process of being moved to weekly testing.
Cluster's origins still unknown
Asked if the current cluster had come from a breach at the quarantine facility, he said: "We simply don't know."
He said one of the positive cases was a port worker, but that person had been identified through the contact-tracing process and they hadn't been in contact with anyone at the port.
There was now a testing team in place in place at the Auckland port, a new team was being set up at Tauranga Port.
Testing of all port workers was initially meant to have been completed by tonight, but that has been extended to the end of the week due to the sheer number of the 12,000 port workers.
"No one is going to be penalised if no one has had their test by later tonight," Bloomfield said.
Ports chief executives' group spokesman Charles Finny said as recently as two weeks ago the maritime sector had been urging health authorities to test at ports, without success.
But Bloomfield rejected the suggestion that the Minsitry of Health had been deaf to his please.
"I have a different view."
He said there was no plan at this stage to prevent international aircrew from flying home domestically to self-isolate after coming back to New Zealand.
Programmes to address anxiety in Māori and Pasifika communities were being addressed, Bloomfield said, but he didn't have any details.
"I can also say the 1737 mental health line has people who speak a range of languages."
Casual contacts
He said the risk was low for people identified as casual contacts, but he identified other locations that positive cases had been, including:
- The Botany Mall from 11am to 2pm on August 11;
- A fitness class in Kingsland;
- The Eden Junior Rugby club from 5.30pm-6.30pm on August 11;
- And a guinea pig show on August 8 from 10am to 2pm.
The environmental testing at the Americold facility in Mt Wellington had been flown to Wellington to be tested, he said.
"We need all those tests to be completed to get a full picture, and they are expected to come back at the end of the week."
Supermarkets have said that some customers were concerned about contact with frozen foods, but Bloomfield said there was no evidence that people could catch Covid-19 from food or food packaging.
He repeated that the virus was tricky, and the virus was the problem, not people. He was heartened by the number of people coming forward to be tested.
"We were under alert level 1 and we were going through a process of scaling up testing availability."
Asked if the Government's testing strategy - from June 23 - was for regular testing of asymptomatic border-facing workers, Bloomfield said: "We couldn't just flick a switch and do that overnight."
He said there had been no failure of testing of frontline border-facing workers, even though Health Minister Chris Hipkins has said that it wasn't happening as Cabinet expected, and Hipkins has taken responsibility for that.
Bloomfield said no one had misled anyone, and that in his communications with ministers it was clear that Cabinet wanted regular testing of border-facing workers - which was being rolled out.
He said there tension between him and the operational arm of the ministry, and there should be a review to make what was happening clearer, and to make "information flows clearer in both directions".
On elimination
He said the elimination approach "has served us very well, and most commentators, not just her but many abroad, support us maintaining that".
On extending alert level 2, Bloomfield said he had been working hard on seeing into the future. But the current settings would give Kiwis "pause for thought" about what level 1 will look like, including there should be more physical distancing and the possible use of masks in some settings.
"All New Zealanders would prefer that we stayed in alert level 1, and perhaps modify (those settings as they currently are)."
Not all of the positive cases in New Zealand from overseas travellers have been sequenced, meaning that the current cluster being connected to an overseas case cannot be ruled out.
Bloomfield faces increasing scrutiny over why Cabinet's instructions for regular testing of border-facing workers hasn't been actioned.
Last week Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said such regular testing was taking place, and this morning she said it was unfair to assume that Bloomfield had misled her.
Health Minister Chris Hipkins has taken responsibility for the failure.
The genome sequencing of the Covid-19 strain in the current cluster suggests that it came from the UK or Australia, but it doesn't match any of the strains from the positive cases in managed isolation so far.
Hipkins was confident all port, border and isolation/quarantine workers would be tested by the end of the week.
She said there appeared to have been weekly testing at the Jet Park, but not weekly testing of every staff member.
"This again is something we are still looking into."
Not the first border blunder
In June, the Ministry of Health revealed 54 people had left a facility on compassionate grounds without first returning a negative Covid-19 test - which was meant to be a prerequisite.
Two of them – sisters who had returned from the UK – drove from Auckland to Wellington, where they subsequently tested positive.
The Government responded by temporarily suspending compassionate leave and bringing in the Defence Force to oversee the how the facilities are run.
The ministry also revealed that the day three and day 12 testing of people staying in managed isolation or quarantine facilities wasn't taking place, despite Bloomfield having already announced it as government policy. Of the 2159 people who left MIQ facilities between June 9 and 16, only 800 of them had been tested.
Bloomfield came under enormous pressure over the blunders, for which he accepted responsibility, as the ministry scrambled to contact them and test them. None of them subsequently tested positive other than the two sisters, but not all could be contacted and some refused to be tested.
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