SYDNEY — New Zealand will go into a three-day, nationwide lockdown late Tuesday after the country reported its first local case of the coronavirus in nearly six months. Auckland, the largest city, where the case was detected, is likely to be shut down for seven days.
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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she was ordering the country’s harshest lockdown in more than a year under the assumption that the case was the more infectious delta variant, with genomic test results expected overnight. She appealed to New Zealanders not to go out unnecessarily.
“Just as we successfully stayed home and saved lives last year, I’m asking the team of five million to unite once more to defeat what is likely to be this more dangerous and transmissible variant of the virus,” she told reporters.
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Health officials said they had found no links to the island nation’s tightly sealed border or strict isolation facilities for returning residents and citizens, raising the possibility that the virus had been circulating in the community.
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The single case has raised alarms in New Zealand, where less than 20 percent of people are fully vaccinated — one of the lowest rates among developed countries.
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Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said that the infected individual, a 58-year-old Auckland man, had tried to register for his dose of vaccine but had encountered problems with the website. People between the ages of 55 and 60 only recently became eligible for vaccinations in New Zealand.
The case is a blow to the country's touted zero-tolerance approach to the coronavirus.
New Zealand has watched warily as neighboring Australia, which has also tried to eliminate the virus, allowed a single case in Sydney to swell to more than 7,000 across multiple states.
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“We’ve seen what happened in Sydney,” Ardern said. “We don't want that experience here.”
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New Zealand suspended a travel bubble between the two countries last month after an infectious Sydney man spent three days in Wellington, though the incident did not lead to additional cases.
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Even after that scare, life has gone on largely as normal in the country of 5 million, with the only known cases occurring among overseas passengers confined to isolation facilities. Rugby games and concerts have continued, to huge crowds.
That was suddenly upended on Tuesday when health officials announced the mystery case.
Worried shoppers packed Auckland’s supermarkets, leading the prime minister to call for calm.
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“It just doesn’t make sense for people to rush out,” she said. “It means you congregate. It means you create more risk.”
Just last week, Ardern announced that vaccinated travelers from low-risk countries would be able to visit New Zealand without quarantining in early 2022.
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