Police have stepped in to help public health authorities with their contact tracing for the Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship sub-cluster.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield confirmed this afternoon that a police liaison is helping Auckland Regional Public Health Service following yet another mini-cluster forming in the city.
The new cluster is connected to the original Auckland outbreak.
Bloomfield said a police liaison will also be helping the regional public health team working on the cluster to identify any areas they need to improve when it comes to contact tracing.
“[It’s] just to see what we can learn from the way police do their investigations - not to take control of our investigations.”
He says they had been working closely with police when they had trouble finding a close contact in the past.
“If we’re having trouble finding someone we really want to identify as a close contact and we can’t find them, and that’s a very small number of people, then often police will support us in going out to find people.”
He says only a small number of people have been traced by police on behalf of public health.
Speaking to RNZ earlier this morning, Health Minister Chris Hipkins said he’d requested police help with the Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship sub-cluster because dealing with those involved was “challenging”.
“There are certainly some within the cluster that don’t accept this or previously accept the science here. That has made this a little more challenging than the others.”
Hipkins said police’s role will be to help get the message across about how serious the situation with Covid-19 is.
“I said to health yesterday I want the police to be involved in helping as well, and that happened yesterday afternoon.”
Hipkins said their role will also be to help the cooperative efforts with the church after more cases linked to a positive case from the church cluster emerged earlier this week.
Those cases included a high school student, a bus driver and a West Auckland public health service worker.
All have been connected back to the church cluster.
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