New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern extends lockdown as virus outbreak widens

[superadmin]

• New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern extended a nationwide lockdown on Friday until midnight on Aug. 24, saying that the outbreak had widened to other cities.
  
• The country had been virus-free and without curbs until Ardern on Tuesday ordered a snap 3-day nationwide lockdown and seven-day shutdown in Auckland.
  
• Just about 19% of the country’s 5.1 million population has been fully vaccinated so far, the slowest among OECD nations.
  

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern extended a nationwide lockdown on Friday as the number of Covid-19 cases in the country jumped and the outbreak widened beyond its largest city, Auckland, to the capital, Wellington.


New Zealanders had been living virus-free and without curbs until Ardern on Tuesday ordered a snap 3-day nationwide lockdown and seven-day shutdown in Auckland after discovering the country’s first case since February.

Ardern extended the lockdown until midnight on Aug. 24, saying that the outbreak had widened to other cities.

“We just don’t quite know the full scale of this delta outbreak,” Ardern said at the news conference.

Health authorities said 11 new cases were recorded on Friday, of which three cases were in Wellington.

The three in Wellington had recently travelled to Auckland and had visited locations that were identified as exposed to the outbreak, the health ministry said in a statement.


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