Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): With regard to the last part of the member’s question, no link has been established with that case at the Four Points. It’s important to note that whilst genome sequencing can reveal that cases are similar, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they come from the same place. So no clear link has been established there.
In terms of the overall source investigation, this may well be one of those cases where we never quite get to the bottom of exactly what happened here. We weren’t able to identify clearly the source of the Americold case which triggered the Auckland outbreak back in August, and it may well be that this is a similar situation. When in doubt, though, there are some more likely scenarios than others, and of course we do have a border worker who was involved here, and so that continues to be one of the more likely of a series of unlikely potential scenarios.
CHRIS BISHOP (National): Well, just as a follow-up to that, is the Government considering, then, bringing this particular border worker that possibly could be the original source infection—bringing them within the overall ambit of the testing regime?
Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): Yes, we absolutely will be doing that. I have just completed a review that we had already started before this most recent group of cases, of looking at that group that’s on the periphery of the border to make sure that everybody was captured that needed to be captured. So someone in the laundry, for example, when we did the initial risk assessment, wouldn’t necessarily have been captured by that initial risk assessment. We’ve learnt a lot more in the six months or so since that first testing order was put in place, and as a result we have made additional changes.
One of the key challenges with that is around the handling of goods that come across the border, because not everybody who handles goods that come across the border—and there are many, many, many thousands of people in that category—is going to be at risk, but there are still some who could be at risk. So making sure that we’re narrowing that down so that we’re dealing with the risk but not capturing people who we hadn’t intended to capture has been one of the challenges.
CHRIS BISHOP (National): We described the decision to go from level 3 in Auckland to level 2 the first time as ambitious, and the reason we did that is that at that time we still didn’t know the source of the source infection, which we still don’t know. There were two new community cases that day and, critically, there were 363 students yet to return a negative COVID test. So my question for the Minister is—and it’s an important one in light of what’s going on potentially with travel bubbles with Australia and the Cook Islands—is the Government changing its general approach to risk? Does it continue to have a zero tolerance approach to community transmission, or has there been a slight loosening of the level of cases in the community that the Government and the country are prepared to tolerate?
Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): There hasn’t been a change to our appetite for risk, if you like. We’re still pursuing an elimination strategy. What there is is more confidence in our contact tracing systems. We have seen other examples over the last six months where we’ve dealt very successfully with cases without the need to escalate alert levels. There were some additional factors around this one—including not knowing the source and, more latterly, in terms of the second lockdown, there being some undisclosed contacts, which meant that there were a greater number of cases than would have otherwise been the case—that made this one a little bit different.
CHRIS BISHOP (National): Just in light of that comment around having more confidence in contact tracing systems, why did the Government fail two of the critical contact tracing metrics recommended by Dr Ayesha Verrall last year? I refer the Minister to metrics S001 and S002, which has been described as critical, and in the case of the
