Coronavirus: Jacinda Ardern outlines lockdown exit strategy, as Auckland remains at level 3

Friday, 21 August 2020

The level 3 lockdown in Auckland will remain in place, with the Government to do another review on Monday.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has outlined the eight key criteria Cabinet will use when it comes to deciding whether it's safe to bring Auckland out of level 3 lockdown.

Auckland has been in level 3 since last Tuesday and on Friday missed out on having lockdown restrictions lifted early after the Government decided the risk was too great.

The Government has decided to stay the course, with level 3 currently scheduled to be lifted at 11.59pm on Wednesday, August 26, but Ardern has left open the possibility of an early lifting being decided by Cabinet at its regular meeting on Monday.

Ardern said she’ll be using eight criteria to determine whether it’s safe to lift restrictions.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says Cabinet will consider eight key criteria when it decides on Monday whether Auckland can move out of level 3 lockdown.

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The first four are health ones: first, Cabinet will be looking at trends in the transmission of the virus.

This includes “the director-general’s confidence in the data”, Ardern said.

Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield, who will provide health advice on the decision, said this doesn’t necessarily just mean that case numbers were coming down, it could just mean the Government was confident it had the virus cornered.

“It’s the pattern of those cases and, in particular, whether any new cases are ones we might expect, so [whether] they are household or workplace contacts or church or school contact,” Bloomfield said.

Ardern said two other health criteria are: the capacity and capability of the testing and contact tracing system, both of which have exceeded expectations during the current outbreak; and the effectiveness of self-isolation and border measures, which have come under scrutiny for underperforming.

The fourth one was the capacity of the health system to move levels. With only a handful of cases currently in hospital, the health system has not come under strain in the current outbreak.

Ardern outlined four broader criteria for shifting alert levels, including the effect on the local economy, which appears to have been severe in Auckland, and the effects on at-risk populations.

The third and fourth broader criteria were the extent to which people have been following the rules and the ability to operationalise a new alert level.

Compliance with the alert levels appears to have been high, with traffic volumes significantly reduced in Auckland. There have been persistent reports of people not wearing masks in public, although this is currently a recommendation, not a rule.

The Government should easily be able to operationalise a new alert level, given the country has already been from level 3 to level 2 before.