Public Health Professor Michael Baker said such outbreaks shouldn't be happening in the first place, he said. "[It's] our seventh border failure in about three months. "This is obviously a pattern here, and I think five of them were staff working in those facilities. Really none of those people should be getting infected at this stage, and so I think we need a systematic way of reducing that risk. "When that happens, we have to say that's a systems failure, or it's a failure of infection control. "We need to firstly control the outbreak, and secondly work out what went wrong so we can prevent it happening again."

The University of Otago academic has been calling on the Government to change the Managed Isolation and Quarantine facilities away from the one-size fits all approach currently adopted.

Baker wants to see travellers from low-risk countries, such as Australia and Pacific island nations, to be able to enter free of quarantining.

For those from countries where there is spread of the virus but is well-controlled - such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore - there would still be a 14-day stay in isolation, but some of it could be done from home.

But for the most high-risk countries (the UK, the US, Russia and India), pre-travel requisites could come into force, with travellers told to spend three days in quarantine and return a negative test, before they even travel. Then, when they arrive in New Zealand, they would stay in a specially designed quarantine facility - not a hotel.