Chris Hipkins, NZ Covid-19 Response Minister: “The policy was to try and keep planeloads of people together in managed isolation because transmission within planes has been a problem.
“If you were isolating out the people who came from the US, the UK or South Africa and then separated them out from others you might potentially increase the risk.
“The safest thing to do is to keep each planeload together because we know that is one of sources of infection is the plane journey itself.”
