New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern put the nation into a three-day lockdown after the discovery of the first community case of COVID-19 since February.
The snap lockdown will begin at midnight Tuesday as authorities rush to identify the source of a single infection in Auckland, Ardern said at a news conference in Wellington on Tuesday. While genome sequencing has yet to be completed, the case is assumed to be the highly infectious delta variant, she said.
"Delta has been a game-changer — we’re responding to that,” Ardern said. "The best thing we can do to get out of this as quickly as we can is to go hard.”