Wellington: New Zealand’s Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) is beginning to scale down its operations, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said on Thursday as 21,015 new community cases were reported in the country.
“With New Zealand now reopening to the world without the requirement to isolate for most, there is a significantly reduced demand for MIQ. This of course means that we no longer need the number of facilities we currently have,” Hipkins said in a statement.
By the end of June, 28 of the current 32 facilities will leave the MIQ network and return to being hotels, Xinhua news agency quoted the Minister as saying.
Among the new community infections reported on Thursday, 7,234 were in the largest city Auckland.
Fifteen new cases were detected at the New Zealand border, according to the Ministry of Health.
Currently there are 845 Covid-19 patients in New Zealand hospitals, including 16 people in intensive care units or high dependency units, according to the Ministry.
New Zealand has reported 306,919 confirmed cases of Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020.
New Zealand is currently at the highest Red settings under its Covid-19 Protection Framework.
At Red settings, face masks are mandatory in many indoor environments and gatherings are limited to 100 people.
