There was a published story in the New Zealand Medical Journal that stated if the country were to relax the border restrictions that were placed due to Covid 19 for travelers to come into the country there is an increased chance of the risk of the virus going rampant within the country again.
The risk itself was calculated at 25% of the population and although for one it may not seem like a big increase in risk but what it does mean is that there will be breaches like the one that happened in the Pullman Hotel in Auckland last month will happen 25% more frequently.
With the risk percentage increasing there is also the chance that the alert levels will have to change to contain the community outbreak if it came to that. This would mean that resources would yet again have to be exhausted and the country would ideally have to go into a total lockdown.
Risk from isolation facilities
The work that was done in the building of the article that was published in the journal was based on a mathematical model this was so that it could estimate the chances of community cases growing from the medically managed isolation facilities within the borders of the country.
There is also that risk of an infected traveler although in isolation could provide 2 negative test and be released after 14 days of quarantine and still be Covid positive and infectious. The gold-standard nasal swab PCR test is good, but it can miss cases, especially in people who are early or late in the course of their infections.
So far, it hasn’t happened in New Zealand’s managed isolation system even though more than 100,000 people have passed through.
Risk from new arrivals
Instead, New Zealand’s problems in managed isolation have been caused by infected arrivals who go on to infect other guests or workers in the facility. Someone who picked up an infection in the last few days of their stay would leave the facility at their most infectious.
