Australia has suspended quarantine-free travel with New Zealand after three new community cases of COVID-19 were detected in Auckland over the weekend. New Zealand said on Sunday it was locking down its largest city after new cases emerged in the country.
Australia’s chief medical officer Paul Kelly said Sunday it was decided that all flights originating in New Zealand would be classified as “Red Zone” flights for an initial period of 72 hours from Monday. “As a result of this, all people arriving on such flights originating within this three-day period will need to go into 14 days of supervised hotel quarantine,” Australia’s Department of Health said.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Monday that genomic sequencing of the latest COVID-19 community cases showed they were the the more transmissible variant first detected in the UK. “We were absolutely right to make the decision to be extra cautious because we assumed it was going to be one of the more transmissible variants,” Ardern said in a Facebook Live post on Monday.
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