There are 21,015 new Covid-19 cases in the community in New Zealand on Thursday, the Ministry of Health has announced.
There are 773 people in hospital with the virus, including 16 in an intensive care or high dependency unit.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health said due to earlier data issues, it was incorrectly reported that 845 people were in hospital with the virus.
Thursday's figure is an increase on Wednesday's 742 hospitalisations. However, it is a slight fall on Wednesday's ICU numbers of 19.
The ministry said in a statement there are more people in hospital with Covid-19 than at any other point over the last two years.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said since February 23, about 87% of cases had been diagnosed through rapid antigen testing.
He said 4% of these RATs had been followed up with a confirmatory PCR test.
The remaining 9% had been diagnosed through a PCR test.
The Director-General of Health says there are 845 people in hospital. (Source: 1News)
Bloomfield said health officials were seeing a similar number of hospitalisations in the Northern Region (Northland, Auckland, Waitematā and Counties Manukau DHBs) recently.
With 515 hospitalisations in the Northern Region on Thursday, Bloomfield said this suggested the number was perhaps levelling off for these DHBs.
Thursday’s 21,015 positive cases, detected through rapid antigen tests (RAT) and PCR tests, are located in Northland (689), Auckland (7234), Waikato (2016), Bay of Plenty (1392), Lakes (632), Hawke’s Bay (700), MidCentral (653), Whanganui (156), Taranaki (524), Tairāwhiti (353), Wairarapa (170), Capital and Coast (1858), Hutt Valley (1103), Nelson Marlborough (449), Canterbury (2021), South Canterbury (109), Southern (918) and West Coast (26).
The location of 12 of the cases is unknown.
The ministry said 20,355 of Thursday's cases were detected through RAT and 660 through PCR tests. A total of 4817 PCR tests were carried out in the last 24 hours.
The number of active community cases is 208,625. They were identified in the past 10 days but have not yet been classified as recovered.
Changes to reporting Covid-19 deaths
Bloomfield also announced the ministry was making changes to the reporting of Covid-related deaths.
From Thursday there will be a new reporting approach, he said.
Bloomfield explained the ministry would now automatically report all deaths of people who have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19.
This approach is used by the UK and many other countries, he said.
Covid-related deaths would be reported in three categories:
- People for whom it is clear Covid-19 is the cause of death
- People who had or were found to have Covid-19 when they died but their cause of death was clearly not Covid-related
- The "largest group", Bloomfield said – is the people whose cause of death is still under investigation, but it is known they had the virus when they died
Bloomfield said as a result New Zealand was now considered to have 91 Covid-related deaths.
He said he wanted to emphasise the total number of deaths remains very low by international comparison and that New Zealand has a very low case fatality rate internationally.
Omicron sub-variant BA.2 dominant
Bloomfield said there had been growth in the proportion of BA.2 — a sublineage of the Omicron variant. He explained two-thirds of the cases genomically sequenced in the last week or so were this sub-variant.
He said most of the people in hospital in January had the Delta variant. In comparison in the last four weeks, of the infected patients who had their genome sequenced, none had the Delta variant.
Bloomfield said Delta was last detected in any community cases genomically sequenced on February 15.
He did say, however, health officials knew the Delta variant was still out there in the community. He explained at least 38 cases in the week ending March 5 were epidemiologically linked to the Delta outbreak.
Fifteen new cases at the border were also announced on Thursday.
On Wednesday, 22,454 community cases were recorded in New Zealand.
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