The number of people being forced into isolation after being at a location of interest continues to explode.
Newshub can reveal that, as of 10am on Saturday, since Tuesday just 1604 COVID Tracer app users received location alerts because they scanned in at a location of interest at the relevant time. That's despite there being more than 5000 confirmed contacts.
Thousands of people are already isolating across the country. One of them is Three funny-man Jeremy Corbett, who was alerted just before Friday night's The Project.
"I got pinged by the Ministry of Health, and that was it. We sorted looked at each other in denial for a bit, and then I unshackled myself from the desk, stood up and walked out the door, went and got a test," Corbett says.
He was the host of a Bayley's Real Estate Conference at Spark Arena last Friday night.
"It was pretty busy, it's about 1100 people at an awards night, all sitting in tables and then they go through and have a dance afterwards. Which I didn't do because I'm not allowed, I'm too old."
The night before, the same infected person was also working at the Mitre 10 Awards, sending another 1000 people into isolation.
There have been 5065 people identified contacts of a case, with another 5000 people expected to be added to the list before midnight.
"If anyone's looking at the contacts thinking 'gosh that's a lot more than we used to have' that's because we've changed the way we're doing things because of Delta," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.
The Ministry of Health has confirmed to Newshub that of the 5000 confirmed contacts of this COVID-cluster, only 1604 of them were able to be alerted through the COVID tracer app.
That’s only roughly 30 percent of contacts that were known earlier on Saturday and shows just how slack Kiwis had become at scanning in.
This has huge implications for the contact tracing teams, it means 3400 contacts had to be tracked down manually, taking up valuable time and resources from contact tracers who are desperately trying to track these people down.
