There is no evidence of fraudulent pre-departure testing in India amid a spike in Covid-19 cases entering New Zealand from the country, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins says.
India today reported 103,558 new Covid-19 infections in the last 24 hours - its biggest single-day spike in confirmed Covid-19 cases since the pandemic began.
"The feedback that we've had so far is that there is no evidence of [fraudulent pre-departure Covid-19 test results]," Hipkins said this afternoon in a joint press conference with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
"There is evidence of widespread and growing transmission of Covid-19 in India."
He said travellers getting tested up to 72 hours before departure could be infected one or two days before the test and may not show up as a positive case during pre-departure testing.
Hipkins said they could also have been infected five or six days prior to their arrival in the country, which "would account for the higher number of positive Day 0, Day 1 tests that we're seeing coming from India".
"We're looking very closely at all of that, looking also at just making sure that airline arrangements are as robust as possible," he said.
More than 103,000 cases were confirmed on Sunday. (Source: Other)
He said feedback from the Government's public health team indicates that infections that are picked up later in a person's stay in managed isolation are most likely to have occurred during transit rather than on a plane.
"The planes are often taking quite a circular route to get to New Zealand so they may be travelling to Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, etc. before arriving in Auckland and it could be at those airports that actually is the highest risk point for people being infected.
"There is still more information. We are concerned about the number of cases coming from India so we're looking at whether there are more things we can do there."
Officials are investigating whether it’s more infectious and affected by vaccines. (Source: Other)
Ardern added the Government has also asked to look at whether there are historic cases coming up during testing and its proportion, with "particular emphasis on are airlines playing their part in ensuring that they do not have symptomatic people boarding, that they are presenting their test results as we expect".
"As the minister said, we are concerned by those numbers, they far and away oustrip any other point of departure for the positives they're presenting but at the same time, they have a very high infection rate at present too," she said.
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