NZ First: April 22, 2020

Lillian spoke to Fletcher this morning about contact tracing, an injection of cash into the regions and the announcement from the SFO that their decision regarding NZ First’s political donations will be out before the election. She started by asking how he felt about moving to level 3 next week.

Fletcher stated the government would have had the necessary capacity for contact tracing as of the 23rd April - the originally stated day to come out of Level 4 before the government announced an extentions. I wrote to the Ministry of Health asking whether this was indeed the case and this was their response:

"The Ministry is confident that New Zealand can provide high quality contact tracing. The Public Health Units (PHUs) and National Close Contact Service (NCCS) have a baseline capacity in place as well as additional capacity they can call on to deal with the contact tracing needs that might be ahead of us.  This includes managing under a range of scenarios that could occur within the different alert levels and controls and includes a current ability to scale up to 10,000 calls a day. From our most recent information from public health units and the National Close Contact Service, for the period 13-17 April, 80% of close contacts were traced within 48 hours of the case being notified to the units."