The Director-General of Health says the man who worked at the Auckland hotel is not linked to the existing South Auckland cluster. Rather, preliminary results showed that genome sequence most closely matched a person who had returned to New Zealand from the US and stayed at Rydges. Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said genome sequencing was being carried out on all new Covid-19 cases, and all cases in managed isolation would now also be sequenced. Testing for the disease was carried out at a diagnostic laboratory, and once a positive sample was found the sample should be sent to a genome sequencing laboratory. Samples for genome sequencing were put through a process in the lab that took about six hours before early results were available.

Source: Stuff August 18, 2020 07:09 UTC