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Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield says a possible link from a case in the Māngere church subcluster to the traveller in the Crowne Plaza has been identified, which could solve the issue of any missing transmission links in the whole outbreak.
Dt Bloomfield also confirmed to The New Zealand Herald this morning that, while there have been more cases since yesterday's update, none so far are outside Auckland.
The Crowne Plaza has been the focus of the source of the outbreak because of genomic sequencing results matching a case who travelled from Sydney and arrived here on August 7.
Bloomfield said health officials were getting closer to tracing how the outbreak started, with the earliest onset of symptoms being on August 10.
"This is someone who is one of our quite early cases, who we think is the most closely connected to the Crowne Plaza at this point in time."
There are two potential areas in the Crowne Plaza where members of the public can share airspace with those in isolation: one is near the atrium at the entrance, and another is a public walkway by the returnees' exercise area.
But Bloomfield said the place where transmission might have taken place wasn't the Crowne Plaza, nor was it a nearby vaccination centre.
"They were in a place where they may have been exposed to the virus - I don't have the detail - very early on, on the 9th or 10th [of August].
"This is someone who is connected to the Assembly of God Māngere cluster, but also has a number of household contacts who are also infected as well."
A connection could mean that the person in the AOG subcluster was infected by the index case, which would mean there are no missing links in the chain of infection.
"It could have been a direct link - that's what's being looked at," Bloomfield said.
"We've had this before where we've never quite been able to nail the exact transmission time and place. But we're pretty close now, and it [may explain] how the outbreak developed out from there."
He added that a link may never be confirmed - just as a link to the border was never definitively established in the February outbreak, or in the August outbreak last year.
No issues have been identified in reviews of the Crowne Plaza's systems - the most recent one was in June - to prevent leakage of the virus into the community.
Work is expected to finish today to close the gap between the top of a perspex barrier in the hotel's atrium and the ceiling - which National Party Covid-19 spokesman Chris Bishop says is contrary to the lack of any safety issues identified.
Yesterday, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said that the work was planned before the current outbreak, and there was no evidence so far to suggest the atrium was where the virus had leaked into the community.
Bloomfield said the high amounts of testing in Auckland meant that officials were "getting close to understanding the perimeter of it".
There was still the issue of the thousands of close contacts who were yet to be reached. Bloomfield said they were being contacted "very quickly" and should all be worked through in the next day or two.
The ministry won't have a sense of whether any of them were essential workers or if they had been at any higher interest locations - for example, any connected to any subcluster - until they've been contacted.
"Those are the three critical bits of information, and particularly for our new cases: are they an essential worker, can we link them to existing clusters or households, and were they out and about in the community while potentially infectious," Bloomfield said.