An update on quarantine free travel will likely come Monday, says Border Easement Taskforce.

Border Easement Taskforce communications manager, Karla Eggelton said the taskforce would meet on Friday to discuss inbound travel from New Zealand.

Eggelton said an announcement on the border covering multiple key topics would likely happen Monday.

The Border Easement Taskforce, established to assess and support two-way quarantine-free travel, originally planned to meet on Tuesday but the meeting was pushed out for Friday.

Cook Islands News asked Eggelton why the meeting was postponed but did not get a reply.

The Cook Islands border has been closed to New Zealand for over three weeks since the first NZ community Covid-19 Delta variant case reported on Monday, August 16. Inbound travel into the Cook Islands has been suspended until at least September 13.

New Zealand dropped to Alert Level 2 for the entire country, excluding Auckland which remains in Alert Level 4, on 11.59pm Monday.

Prime Minister Mark Brown, in his fortnightly Cook Islands News column on Tuesday, said the drop in NZ’s alert levels “bring us closer to loosening up our border, not only to begin allowing visitors back in, but to allow nearly 300 of our people who were caught in the lockdown in New Zealand, to come home”.

Cook Islands News asked the Border Easement Taskforce on September 3 what New Zealand alert level was needed for the borders to open.

On Tuesday, Eggelton said any information found prior to the Border Easement Taskforce meeting on Friday would be speculation and not helpful.

This after a leading Pacific health expert Dr Colin Tukuitonga said on Monday the Cook Islands should consider opening its borders when the whole of New Zealand enters Alert Level 2.

Tukuitonga said the Cook Islands should only let in vaccinated travellers into the country when the borders did open and consider mask use indoors.

He also said the Cook Islands should consider random Covid-19 surveillance testing as well.