The New Zealand Auckland district health board faced criticism for allowing hundreds of visitors to see patients a day despite a strict city-wide lock down in place to help stamp out an outbreak of the highly infectious Delta variant.
Around 5 p.m. last week, Kevin, a recent patient at an Auckland, New Zealand, hospital, noticed a young woman disappear behind a curtain to visit another patient in his ward.
Kevin alerted the staff to the sexual activity, and they quickly intervened.
“There was a view that, ‘Hey, don’t be a spoilsport,’ but it was the wider COVID question that I was raising, and in fact, I made a complaint to the staff on that,” said Kevin.
New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern, was asked by a reporter at a press conference about the sexual disregard for social distancing. Arden was at first flustered and then amused, she responded, “I would say, generally, regardless of the Covid status, that kind of thing shouldn’t generally be part of visiting hours, I would have thought.”
On September 13, 2021, New Zealand extended the strict lockdown of Auckland for another week due to the persistence of Covid-19 transmission. Auckland, the country’s most populous city which was confined with the rest of the country in mid-August after a single case of Covid-19 was reported, it will remain under a national level 4 alert until midnight on Sep. 21, 2021 Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.