November 03, 2021
Poor phone etiquette sparks Covid picket
Fears Covid-19 could have reached a remote far north community led to a stand off at the gates of a Karikari Peninsula resort yesterday.
Haiti-tai-marangai Marae chair Caroline Snowden says the hapū picketed the gates of Carrington Estate after failing to get clarity over a report from whānau working there that it has been visited by someone who had tested positive for Covid-19.
She says repeated efforts to talk to the manager were unsuccessful.
“What we said to them was ‘please pass on to your boss, William Tan and let him know if he is not going to respond to our calls we will take action and we will park outside the front of the resort gates.’ All we wanted was to have a conversation with him about what he was doing for the safety of his staff and of the whole peninsula,” Ms Snowden says.
Caroline Snowden says it took several hours of calling health authorities to get the information that the person who visited the resort was not the Covid case but his brother, at which stage the picket was stood down.
The far north past a line from Mangamuka Junction to Kaeo is now in level 3 lockdown until at least Monday because of 2 cases which could not be epidemiologically linked to other cases in the region.