The Prime Minister says despite 'encouraging' signs the number of COVID-19 cases in the country are beginning to stabilise the lockdown will not be ending early.
The lockdown began on March 26 after the nation's alert level was raised to 4. Jacinda Ardern said at the time it would last at least four weeks, but despite some signs the measures are having an effect on "flattening the curve" no decision has been made over whether it will need to be extended or not.
Ardern told The AM Show on Monday that "it is just too early to say" how effective the current measures have been in stemming the virus' spread.
"What I can definitely tell you is we haven't made the decision at this point to extend, because I see lots of rumours about that," Ardern said.
"No decision has been made because we essentially don't have the data we need yet - we're not even at the halfway point where we can really see the effects."
Ardern said the Government's decision regarding how long the lockdown needed to last would be based on three things: the rate cases continue to increase at, how much community transmission is going on, and how the virus is spreading in the regions.
So far, there were various encouraging signs that the virus was being kept under control here, she said.
"We've seen a bit of stabilisation in our case numbers, but I don't want to be too quick to draw any conclusions from that - because I've seen comments like that made in other countries and they've seen a turnaround, so I don't want to get ahead of ourselves."
Modelling also showed that many of the measures were working to minimise the outbreak.
"Were it not for all of the actions that we've taken, be it the border controls and others, we were predicted to have 4000 cases at this point. Whereas we have 1039. So that's a reason for us to stay the course but also a reason for me to say thank you to New Zealand."
Despite certain promising signs, Ardern said there was no way the lockdown would finish before the planned four weeks.
"We actually need a couple of cycles of transmission and if we did that we really risk getting ahead of ourselves."
