Auckland came out of a week-long blockade imposed after a community grouping of the UK’s most contagious coronavirus variant.
There were no new local cases of Covid-19 recorded on Sunday, health officials said, allowing restrictions to ease. If no community case is confirmed for the rest of Sunday, it would be seven full days since the last community case.
There are still limits to public meetings in the city of almost two million, however, and masks are mandatory on public transport.
TVNZ footage showed people lining up at coffee shops on Sunday morning, with many saying they were feeling relieved.
The government said it could further reduce restrictions in Auckland on Friday to bring them to the same level as in the rest of New Zealand.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Friday that she supports New Zealand’s decision to pursue an elimination strategy, but acknowledged that it comes with costs, from job losses to school field cancellations.
She said the government was right to impose the seven-day blockade, just a few weeks after lifting three-day instant restrictions, due to the more communicable and unpredictable nature of the UK variant.
“Level three provided us with an extra layer of security while addressing the unknowns and reducing the risk,” she said.
The breach of rules at level three, contributing to the spread in the Auckland cluster in late February, was a critical point for criticism this week – and sparked calls for the government to do more in terms of community outreach.
Ardern said she did not believe that anyone who deliberately broke level three restrictions would do anything wrong, but that she saw no benefit in continuing to “come and go” in individual cases last week.
Rapid public health measures combined with aggressive contact screening, border closure and mandatory quarantine for travelers were held responsible for New Zealand and Australia’s success in preventing the pandemic from spreading.
Both countries saw their economies recovering rapidly in the second half of 2020. New Zealand has reported just over 2,000 cases of the coronavirus and 26 deaths since the start of the pandemic.