Covid-19: 33 new community cases as Cabinet considers alert levels – Ministry

By RNZ.co.nz. Republished with permission

There are 33 new community cases of Covid-19 being reported today, the Ministry of Health has confirmed.

In a statement, the ministry said there were also three new cases in managed isolation facilities.

All the new cases are in Auckland, bringing the total number of community cases in the current outbreak to 955.

The ministry said 32 of today’s cases have been epidemiologically linked. The one case yet to be linked is a person who presented to Middlemore Hospital on Saturday. There are seven others in their household. All seven are included in today’s 33.

There are eight epidemiologically linked sub-clusters. The two largest subclusters are the Māngere church group – 381 and the Birkdale social network cluster – 76. There are nine epidemiologically unlinked sub-clusters, the ministry said.

In hospital, there are 21 cases – four in North Shore, seven in Auckland and 10 in Middlemore. There are also four cases in ICU or HDU.

That brings the total of cases since the pandemic began to 3593.

On historical cases, there have been 137 out of 1775 since 1 January 2021. Four previously reported historical cases now have an ‘active’ health status and have been removed from the tally, which is why the number has reduced, the ministry said.

So far, 36,681 contacts have been identified and 87 percent of them have received an outbound call from contact tracers. At least 92 percent have had at least one test result.

There are 126 locations of interest.

On testing, there have been 8657 Covid-19 tests in the last 24 hours – 4250 of them in Auckland, bringing the total number of tests to date to 3,148,945.

There have been no unexpected wastewater detections in past 24 hours.

On vaccines, 20,490 people had their first dose yesterday and 13,376 had their second. To date 2,862,765 people have had their first and 1,462,725 have had their second.

There are now 3,209,541 people registered to the Covid-19 tracer app.

Meanwhile, Cabinet is this afternoon considering changes to alert levels, with some experts saying Auckland cannot wait in alert level 4 for high vaccination rates, but others warning that “mystery” unlinked cases and cases at Middlemore Hospital make it unlikely the city will see loosened restrictions just yet.

Daily community case numbers spiked again over the weekend, with 20 yesterday, and 23 on Saturday, up from 11 on Friday.

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