A healthcare worker takes a nasal swab sample from a resident in Auckland.

New Zealand moved into a snap a nationwide three-day lockdown on Tuesday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced after a new case of COVID-19 was discovered in the biggest city of Auckland.

The lockdown will run for seven days in Auckland, but three days elsewhere, after identifying a single case of locally transmitted COVID-19 suspected to be the Delta variant. Ardern said authorities were assuming the new case was a Delta variant although this has not been confirmed.

READ MORE

Walk-in vaccination centres for students open in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain

India sees major decline in daily coronavirus cases

Prime Minister also said New Zealand, which had not recorded any infections in the community for six months, could not take any chances with the "game changer" Delta strain.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks during an event. File photo

"We have seen what can happen elsewhere if we fail to get on top of it. We only get one chance," Ardern said in a televised national address.

She said Auckland, where the infected man lives, and Coromandel, where he had visited, would go into a full lockdown for seven days and the remainder of the country for three days while health experts tried to find the source of his infection.

New Zealand had managed to stamp out the virus, and the last outbreak was in February. But Ardern had been warning that the contagiousness of the Delta variant would probably require more drastic action than previous outbreaks.