The extent of New Zealand's latest COVID-19 cluster will be revealed on Monday.
The "November quarantine cluster", as it's being called, started when a quarantine worker at Auckland's Jet Park facility tested positive for the virus on Friday.
Just one of the 25 close contacts of the quarantine worker has tested positive so far - another Defence Force staffer who was working in Auckland last week.
That person then flew back to Wellington on Thursday, visiting a number of locations within Auckland Airport and also going to a central Wellington restaurant at lunchtime on Friday.
The Ministry of Health said it sent push notifications to the smartphones of people who had used the COVID Tracer app to log in at "several locations of interest" visited by the positive case.
Those locations are:
Domestic Terminal, Auckland Airport: 5.30pm - 7:45pm, November 5
Avis Car Rental, Auckland Airport: 5.00pm - 5:15pm, November 5
Orleans Chicken & Waffles, Auckland Airport: 5:30 - 7:00pm, November 5
The Gypsy Moth, Auckland Airport: 7.00pm - 7:15pm, November 5
Hudsons, Auckland Airport: 7.00pm - 7:15pm, November 5
Little Penang, The Terrace, Wellington: 1:15pm - 3.45pm, November 6
Users were advised they may have been in contact with COVID-19 and were told to contact Healthline if they began to feel unwell.
The Ministry of Health has been working to find and test any close contacts, with results expected to be revealed on Monday afternoon.
Professor of Public Health Michael Baker said those results will show the extent and seriousness of the cluster.
"That will give us a much better idea as to whether this outbreak is in the low-risk end, which hopefully it is, or whether it has some features that make it a high-risk event."
Such outbreaks shouldn't be happening in the first place, he said.
"[It's] our seventh border failure in about three months.
"This is obviously a pattern here, and I think five of them were staff working in those facilities. Really none of those people should be getting infected at this stage, and so I think we need a systematic way of reducing that risk.
"When that happens, we have to say that's a systems failure, or it's a failure of infection control.
"We need to firstly control the outbreak, and secondly work out what went wrong so we can prevent it happening again."
The University of Otago academic has been calling on the Government to change the Managed Isolation and Quarantine facilities away from the one-size fits all approach currently adopted.
Baker wants to see travellers from low-risk countries, such as Australia and Pacific island nations, to be able to enter free of quarantining.
For those from countries where there is spread of the virus but is well-controlled - such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore - there would still be a 14-day stay in isolation, but some of it could be done from home.
But for the most high-risk countries (the UK, the US, Russia and India), pre-travel requisites could come into force, with travellers told to spend three days in quarantine and return a negative test, before they even travel. Then, when they arrive in New Zealand, they would stay in a specially designed quarantine facility - not a hotel.
RNZ
