‘Do it for our kids’: Ardern urges people to get Covid vaccine as New Zealand reports 13 cases

Jacinda Ardern has implored people to get vaccinated “for our kids”, as New Zealand reported 13 new cases of coronavirus in the community, including a truck driver who travelled outside Auckland as an essential worker.

Auckland is in a level four lockdown – the highest setting – as the country races to stamp out an outbreak of the highly infectious Delta variant. The rest of the country can now operate relatively freely, with mask requirements and some restrictions on gathering size. The total number in the outbreak is now 996.

The director general of health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, said health officials were interviewing the driver to find out if there were locations of interest. The driver, who delivers food to supermarkets, had tested negative for Covid-19 on 22 August, but was tested again after a household contact tested positive.

Related: New Zealand reopens MIQ border bookings as new Covid cases drop to 14

The driver travelled to Hamilton, Cambridge and Tauranga, but it is not yet clear if they were infectious during that period, nor how many people they came into contact with.

From midnight Thursday, essential workers travelling across the Auckland border will be required to show proof that they have been tested for Covid-19 in the previous seven days. “This case does emphasise the importance of our approach to testing people travelling across the Auckland boundary,” Bloomfield said.

On Thursday, the deputy prime minister, Grant Robertson, announced the Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund would get a $7bn boost, on top of the existing $62bn already allocated since the start of the pandemic, after the economy performed better than expected.

GDP rose 2.8% in the June quarter, following on from a 1.4% increase in the previous March quarter. The economy in the June 2021 quarter was 4.3% above where it was in the pre-Covid December 2019 quarter.

“This was a significantly better result than most forecasters had predicted,” Roberston said.

“We have already boosted support to business in this lockdown and the extra funding will be targeted at further economic support as well as building resilience in our health system, supporting the vaccination rollout and border and MIQ [Managed isolation and quarantine] provision.”

Of the 13 new cases, all are in Auckland, and three are yet to be epidemiologically linked. Nineteen people are in hospital and four are in intensive care. Nearly 69% of the eligible population (12 years and older) have had their first vaccine dose and just over 35% are fully vaccinated.*

Bloomfield said it was “mission critical” for every eligible New Zealander to get vaccinated.

“The evidence could not be clearer. In countries with high vaccination rates, Covid-19 has become an outbreak, a pandemic, or an epidemic of the unvaccinated. We need to be at, or above, 90% and that is where everybody needs to be thinking about,” he said.

The prime minister implored people to get vaccinated to protect those who cannot be.

“There’s a whole group of children that cannot be vaccinated right now, they’re not eligible. And yet we are increasingly seeing Covid-19 reach our children. So, if you don’t feel like doing it for yourself, do it for our kids,” Ardern said.

Related: Against all odds: how New Zealand is bending the Delta curve

Cabinet and health officials had discussed any potential changes to the lockdown alert level systems and had decided that alert level one would not change in light of the Delta variant.

“At this level we are prepared, and prepared means of course we scan, we wear masks in high density places where it’s hard to contact trace like buses, but we don’t have Covid in the community and so we otherwise [have] pretty normal lives,” Ardern said.

The government added restrictions to level two to match the risks of Delta.

Meanwhile, the first in a fleet of mobile vaccination buses was launched in Auckland on Thursday morning. One of these has been named “Shot, bro”, after Ardern conducted an informal poll on Facebook, on Wednesday night. Roughly 28,000 people voted on the poll.

“In defence of Shot Bro ... I think it’s pretty unique to New Zealand. I thought it wasn’t bad,” Ardern said.

*A note on data: the Guardian has begun calculating the percentage of NZ’s eligible population vaccinated from Statistics New Zealand population data, comparing numbers vaccinated against a total 12+ population of 4,355,300. This may differ slightly from government-generated percentages that use different denominators, such as the Health Service Utilisation Population – which measures all those 12+ who are engaged with the health system.