Places in Auckland that pose a "very low" public health risk in the Delta outbreak will no longer be reported as locations of interest, the Director of Public Health says.
Dr Caroline McElnay said places like supermarkets and drive-thrus were "no longer being reported as locations of interest in Auckland because the public health risk is very low".
She said the change was because of the high number of new and active community cases of Covid-19 in the region.
Previously, most known locations of interest that could have resulted in Covid-19 spreading were shared publicly.
"We will continue to publish higher risk, close contact exposure events in public spaces when they occur, such as gyms, indoor recreation centres and movie theatres — that’s clearly not the case in Auckland at the moment," she said.
The Ministry of Health will continue to publish 'casual exposure events' outside of Auckland "because there are currently much fewer of those", McElnay said.
She said work was also underway to improve an interactive map of the locations of interest, so people can easily see where hotspots are.
In August, hundreds of locations of interest were listed on the Ministry of Health’s website and thousands of people were classified as contacts because of Delta’s increased transmissibility.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said at the time, data later revealed that transmission only happened in a handful of those locations .
The shift also comes as the Ministry of Health signalled it would no longer investigate where unlinked cases in Auckland have come from, but instead concentrate on where else the virus could have spread from that person.
SHARE ME