Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield has announced an additional nine people have died with Covid-19 in the past two weeks as health officials update death definitions.
In a media conference, Bloomfield said the Ministry of Health was shifting to a new system of reporting Covid-19 deaths and that a “reconciliation” of numbers had resulted in changes to the overall count.
“Over the last two weeks, there have been an additional nine deaths that are recorded in our deaths database of people who have died within 28 days of a Covid diagnosis, but those hadn't to date been publicly announced,” he said.
“The main reason for this is these are people who might for example have died in an aged residential care facility - a GP might have certified the cause of death - but it wasn't notified necessarily to our public health unit and notified through our old system.”
In a statement, the Ministry of Health said its previous total for Covid-19 deaths had been 83 prior to adding the additional deaths.
"With one death announced in Bay of Plenty yesterday subsequently being found not to be Covid-19 related, the total number of deaths publicly reported to date is 91."
Bloomfield said the new system of reporting deaths would see New Zealand adopting a similar approach to the “UK and many other countries”.
However, health officials would continue to report deaths on both the old and new systems under what Bloomfield said was a “dual reporting approach”.
The new approach would mean automatically reporting all deaths of people who die within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19.
Meanwhile, health officials are now also categorising deaths in three separate groups.
The figures announced by Bloomfield included categorised deaths which were outside of the new 28-day standard.
The first category was where it was clear Covid-19 had caused someone to die. This included 34 deaths.
Meanwhile, the second group would be used to categorise people who had tested positive but where their death “was clearly not Covid-19 related”. There were only two people in this category.
Bloomfield said the third group of deaths, which were still under investigation, was currently the largest with 48 deaths reported.
“Many of those will be with the coroner to determine the cause of death, but we know for sure they had Covid-19 when they died, it's just not clear whether that was the cause of their death or they happened to have Covid-19.”
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