Later in the day, nine floors above the bunker, Cabinet decided to lift Auckland’s Alert Level 3 lockdown and to ease restrictions across the rest of New Zealand from 6am tomorrow. If the country’s Covid situation does not worsen, Ms Ardern said the Super City could move to Alert Level 1 before next weekend. Beyond the alert level decision, Ms Ardern said she will outline what the vaccination campaign will mean for New Zealand’s Covid elimination strategy. Despite five days straight of no new community cases, Ms Ardern said Cabinet did not want to lift lockdown early to give the best chance for any positive tests to "manifest" themselves. Ms Ardern summed up the outbreak as "unpredictable" because there were fewer cases than expected, given how easily it had transmitted between some people.

Source: Otago Daily Times March 05, 2021 15:33 UTC