New Zealand's largest city Auckland back to lockdown after Covid-19 case

Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern has announced Auckland will go into lockdown for one week, after just one new local case of Covid-19.

The case, known as Case M, is an older sibling of a Papatoetoe High School student who was a casual plus contact.

Ms Ardern said the new case, a high school student, now has no symptoms of the virus.

This raised the possibility that the infection had been acquired in the community. The case had been infectious for as long as a week and had not been isolating.

Ardern and Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield announced the alert level change at a hastily-arranged press conference after an emergency Cabinet meeting on Saturday evening. "As a result, the person is regarded as being potentially infectious from Sunday 21 February", the MoH says.

"The high school student in the household has tested negative for COVID-19 on three separate occasions, and now has no symptoms for COVID-19", she said.

She said she didn't want to create an environment where anyone was nervous to get a test. "Test results for the other family members are expected this evening". However, he was only tested on Friday.

In mid-February, Auckland's almost two million residents were plunged into a snap three-day lockdown after a family of three were diagnosed with the more transmissible United Kingdom variant of COVID-19.

Rather than traditional respiratory symptoms, he said sufferers were experiencing more muscle aches, flu-like symptoms, general weakness and fatigue.

The restrictions are in response to a new community case she said does not appear to be connected to a cluster of cases in the south of Auckland.

Both Ardern and Bloomfield defended the decision to move Auckland out of lockdown on February 17 and to Level 1 on February 22.

A list of locations of interest for contact tracing can be found below.

For up-to-date information on testing locations in Auckland, visit the Auckland Regional Public Health Service website and all testing locations nationwide, visit the Healthpoint website.