But experts still warn that potential super-spreader events may have worsened the scale of the outbreak, which has so far grown to 20 cases. Today, it was revealed Auckland's community positive cases were a close genomic match with a recent returnee from Sydney on a managed red zone flight on August 7. "And this all means that it's likely that we're dealing with more of a contained outbreak than we initially had thought." "We've just learned there's been about 2000 close contacts across the SkyCity Casino, so there's still the potential that we could have had a number of big super-spreading events," Plank said. "And that's going to be the next big thing to look out for as the results of testing those close contacts come in."

Source: Otago Daily Times August 19, 2021 04:05 UTC