Wellington: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Monday extended the lock in Auckland for two weeks, while officials reported the country’s first death was related to the Pfizer-Bionontech Covid-19 vaccine.
New Zealand is mostly free of viruses for months, except a small number of cases in February, until the Delta variant which was imported from Australia encouraged Ardern to order national shots on August 17.
Infection in the outbreak has reached 562 but the number of new cases fell to 53 on Monday, the lowest in the last five days.
“I know we all feel encouraged that our number is lower than what we have seen in the past few days and I know we are all willing to keep the trend,” Ardern said at a press conference.
“Work hasn’t been done and we need to go on.” About 1.7 million aucklanders will remain in the tight level 4 lockdown for two more weeks, while restrictions for the rest of the state will fall slightly to the level 3.
Ardern hard and fast locking, along with closing the international border from March 2020, is credited With Reining in Covid-19 in this country.
However, the government is now facing questions for delayed vaccine launches, as well as increasing costs in a country that depends on immigrant workers.
About 21% of the population of 5.1 million people has been fully vaccinated, the slowest pace among the rich countries of grouping OECD.
The death of the Ministry of Health’s vaccine on Monday announced a woman had died of myocarditis, known as a rare side effect of the Pfizer-Bionth-19 vaccine.
Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle that can limit the ability of organs to pump blood and can cause changes in the rhythm of the heartbeat.
The Ministry of Health does not provide women’s age.
Pfizer in New Zealand does not immediately reply to email requests for comments.
Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said the risk of myocarditis after the vaccine was much lower than the risk of myocarditis after being infected with Covid-19.
“And that’s part of the reason we are very open about this case,” Bloomfield said.
“It is very interesting internationally because it is one of the few cases where we have various evidence around side effects and then able to explain this death.” New Zealand has the temporary use of PFIZER-BIONTECH, JANSSEN, and AstraZeneca vaccines, but only the Pfizer-Bionontech vaccine that has been approved to be launched to the public.
Ardern said the country had 840,000 doses of the remaining Pfizer-Bionth vaccine and continued to receive 350,000 doses every week.