Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield says the Government is "actively looking at" relaxing the rules around people visiting dying family members as New Zealand prepares to return to alert level three amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr Bloomfield answered questions from the public on the Minstry of Health Facebook page this afternoon.
On whether the Government would consider relaxing the rules around people being allowed to be with a dying family member, he said it was being looked at.
"I can say that this is something that we are looking at, and will certainly be something that we will be wanting to give advice about, especially as part of a step down to level three restrictions," he said.
"I'm sure we've all experienced the death of a loved one in our own families and we recognise just the huge impact it has on members of a family, and of course, on those who are dying to be able to have those who are special to them around them."
"I want to say we are very aware of this, we're actively looking at it, and it's one area where we'll want to be looking at how we could relax that whilst still keeping people safe and so that's very active in our consideration."
In another question, Dr Bloomfield was asked about the country rolling out randomised surveillance community testing. He said that was not currently on the cards.
"We're not planning to do that at this point in time and there's a reason for that, because of the very low number of cases we know are out there, doing randomised testing would not tell us anything more than what we know already from our current testing."
"We've done over 60,000 tests. We've got somewhere between over 1300 positive tests, so our positivity rate from those tests - and these are all of people who've had symptoms and/or were known contacts of cases - our positivity rate is still only somewhere between one and two per cent.
"If we were to randomly survey people out there, we would need to really do a very, very big sample of testing to even find one or two cases, if they were there."
"What's more likely in what we will do is we will perhaps do some targeted testing in some areas and go and find people who might have symptoms but might not be presenting, either through Healthline or to their GP or turning up at one of the testing and swabbing centres."
While the FDA in the US has approved drug hydroxychloroquine, which has been touted by President Donald Trump as a treatment for coronavirus, Dr Bloomfield said there is "simply not yet enough evidence" for the drug to be used here.
"Regardless of what the FDA may say, there's not enough evidence for us to really be able to put it through our approval process as yet as a proven treatment for Covid-19. But obviously, if there were treatments that were shown to be useful and effecacious and, importantly, safe, and I should say hydroxychloroquine is a drug that can have quite significant side-effects."
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