COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins has defended the Government’s handling of domestic travel outside of the Auckland Border.

Two Christchurch residents tested positive for Covid-19 after one unvaccinated woman, in her 50s, travelled to and from Auckland for childcare purposes.

Hipkins was asked at this afternoon’s press conference if the Government would consider making it mandatory for those travelling out of Auckland to be vaccinated.

He said, “there’s always a practical trade-off, I think would be the way that I would summarise it.”

“A vaccination requirement just adds an extra layer of complexity to that which has the potential to slow down supply lines and so on.”

“Some of those challenges are not necessarily insurmountable, but we do need to work our way through those carefully and that would be subject to any decision by Cabinet.”

He said “Similarly, when we talk about domestic air travel, for example, there are some factors that we need to work so it’s not a completely simple equation.”

“People travel for medical reasons, for example, using planes, and may not be vaccinated at the time that they are traveling.”

“So we need to think about how we would handle those.”

“So we’ve just got to work our way through all of those considerations carefully.”

As of 2pm, the location of interest sites were not available on the Ministry of Health website.