South Auckland will host the country's first mass vaccination event delivering 15,000 doses over three days. On people arriving and returning from Australia without doing pre-departure testing, Hipkins said it was a combination of people accidentally forgetting and some deliberately avoiding it. Hipkins said advice a week ago from the Ministry had informed the decision to allow saliva testing to replace nasal swabs. The feedback, with saliva testing at a limited number of sites, was that if they had to do nasal as well there was no real benefit. It was hoped now there would be much more "enthusiasm" and saliva testing would be rolled out to more sites, Hipkins said.

Source: New Zealand Herald July 14, 2021 00:48 UTC