The Government has announced New Zealand's travel bubble with Western Australia will resume on Wednesday.
COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins announced the lifting of the travel pause will occur at 12pm noon on April 28, 2021 for travellers who have not been identified as contacts.
Close contacts of people with COVID-19 will be required to complete 14 days of self-isolation upon return to New Zealand, and provide evidence of a negative COVID-19 test before departure.
Casual contacts - those who were at the locations of interest at the published time - will not be allowed to travel to New Zealand until 14 days after they were at the location of interest. Once in New Zealand, they will be required to self-isolate for five days and return a negative COVID-19 test, as well as monitoring symptoms while in New Zealand.
"The Government is satisfied the risk is low, based on the advice of the Director-General of Health, and that the Trans-Tasman Bubble is working largely as planned," Hipkins said.
"The advice is that the Perth cluster appears to be contained and the post-lockdown transition response measures the Western Australia Government introduced will provide an additional layer of assurance."
Western Australia's state capital Perth and the nearby Peel region were plunged into a three-day lockdown over the long weekend after a Melbourne man spent five days in the area while potentially infectious with COVID-19.
In response to the developments, New Zealand's COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins confirmed on Friday night travel between New Zealand and Western Australia would be paused.
The lockdown ended on Monday and the bubble, which allows two-way quarantine-free travel between the country and state, will resume on Wednesday.
Experts had predicted the bubble would resume this week.
"I think we'll see a resumption of the travel bubble sometime this week," University of Auckland disease modeller Shaun Hendy told The AM Show on Tuesday morning.
"It may not be immediate, but the Government may signal it will lift those restrictions sometime this week and travel will resume. That cluster does look to have been brought under control by the Australian authorities, so the risks are relatively low at this stage."
