The New Zealand Ministry of Health said Friday that a man who has tested positive for the coronavirus recently attended a sold-out rock concert while potentially contagious.
Identified as a New Zealand citizen in his 30s, the person attended a performance by the band Tool at the Spark Arena in Auckland last Friday, Feb. 28, according to the ministry.
In a statement, the ministry said the concertgoer was in the general admission standing area in the front left-hand quadrant of the 12,000-person capacity multipurpose arena.
Attendees who were in the same area during the concert should be aware of the symptoms associated with the virus and contact the ministry if they start to show, the statement said.
Spark Arena and Ticketmaster have also collaborated to contact other concertgoers who were in the same general admission area during the event, the ministry added.
Neither immediately returned messages requesting comment.
The concertgoer who tested positive for the coronavirus is the fourth person in New Zealand confirmed to have contracted the infectious respiratory disease and is the partner of one of the other three, according to the ministry. He is in self-isolation at home and does not require hospital-level care, the ministry said.
Individuals who attended the same concert but were in a different section of the arena are at “low risk” of contracting the coronavirus, New Zealand Director-General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield said at a press conference Friday.
More than 100,000 cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed across over 90 countries since the disease was discovered in December in Wuhan, China, including over 200 in the U.S.
The World Health Organization has put the number of people who have died after contracting the coronavirus at more than 3,000 as of Friday evening.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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