Auckland, the country’s largest city, is likely to be shut down for a week, officials said, as leader Jacinda Ardern faces pressure over a slow vaccine rollout.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced an alert-level 4 lockdown starting at 11.59pm tonight for seven days in Auckland and Coromandel, and three days elsewhere.
One new case is all it took to send New Zealand into a three-day, nationwide lockdown late Tuesday as the country's six-month streak without local transmission came to an end.
The snap lockdown will begin at midnight tonight as authorities rush to identify the source of a single infection in largest city Auckland, Ardern said at a news conference Tuesday in Wellington. While genome sequencing has yet to be completed, the case is assumed to be the highly infectious delta variant, she said.
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