Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson says he is expecting more Covid-19 community cases to be announced today, after the current cluster yesterday grew to 31.
Robertson was unable to say if there were any new Covid-19 community cases in New Zealand overnight as he hadn't had an update.
However, he told Newshub on Saturday morning: "Yes there will be more cases.
"We're in that part of the outbreak where the number of cases will keep growing so we will see more cases, in part because we've seen such an extraordinary response on testing."
Yesterday more than 40,000 tests were taken around the country.
"The number of locations of interest and people involved indicated that we're doing a good job around contact tracing but we just have to accept that things get worse before they get better," Robertson said.
There are currently 31 Covid-19 cases in the community, mainly in Auckland bar three which emerged in Wellington on Friday.
The outbreak of the Delta variant has been found to be a "close match" to a recent returnee from Sydney.
The Government announced Friday that New Zealand would remain at Alert Level 4 until 11.59pm Tuesday.
"What we're doing here [with lockdown] is just giving ourselves the time to look at all the data that emerges over the weekend," Robertson said.
"Quite clearly people in the Auckland area are going to be aware of the increasing number of locations of interest and the fact that putting a ring around outbreak at the moment is tough, what we wanted to do was make sure that we made all those decisions on Monday together with all of the evidence and then we'll give people the outcome of that then."
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