Cabinet will meet today to decide on the status of the current Alert Level 2 which ends at 11.59pm tonight.

The Tepaeru Herrmann-chaired Border Easement Taskforce was supposed to meet last night to prepare recommendations to Cabinet.

The Taskforce’s recommendations are expected to be based on the number of Covid-19 community cases of the highly infectious Delta variant in New Zealand and the test results here.

As of Saturday night, 1934 people were swabbed from Rarotonga and Aitutaki, all returning negative results. There was no testing carried out yesterday.

New Zealand yesterday announced 35 new community cases of Covid-19 – 33 in Auckland and two from Wellington – bringing the total number of cases to 107.

As of 7pm last night, the total number of community cases in Auckland was 99 and Wellington’s number of community cases increased to eight.

“Of the 107 cases in the cluster, 72 are already epidemiologically linked to other community cases identified in the outbreak. Investigations are continuing to determine whether and how the remaining 35 cases are linked to the outbreak,” the NZ health ministry yesterday said in a statement.

“However, most have a plausible link on initial assessment. For example, people were at a location of interest. We will continue to release this information and new locations of interest as it becomes available.”

NZ Cabinet decided all of New Zealand will remain in level 4 lockdown for an additional four days, until 11.59pm 27 August (NZ time); Auckland will remain in level 4 until 11.59pm 31 August.

On Wednesday, Cook Islands Cabinet decided to extend the current Alert Level 2 status as well as continued suspension of inwards flight arrivals until 11.59pm Monday, August 23. A Ministerial order that requires flights to the Pa Enua to be cargo only flights, with returning flights able to transport passengers and cargo to Rarotonga, remains in place.