There are 7930 new Covid-19 cases in New Zealand on Saturday, the Ministry of Health has announced.
Nineteen deaths of people with the virus were also announced, with the deaths stretching back over the past seven days.
Two of the seven deaths were in people under 9 years old. One was in their 20s, four in their 60s, two in their 70s, five in their 80s, and five aged over 90.
It takes the total number of publicly reported deaths of people with Covid-19 to 655 and the rolling seven-day average of deaths to 13.
The Ministry of Health also reported the first border case of the Omicron XE variant. This variant is a mix of the BA.1 and BA.2 sub-variants of Omicron.
The ministry said current public health guidelines in place were "assessed to be appropriate for managing XE and no changes are required".
"There is some early evidence that it may be slightly more transmissible than BA.2, which is more transmissible than BA.1," the Ministry of Health said.
"There is no evidence to date that XE causes more severe disease than other Omicron lineages, noting that it takes weeks or months to identify the severity of each new variant."
Saturday's 7930 new community cases, which were detected through PCR and RATs, were found in: Northland (275), Auckland (2,037), Waikato (548), Bay of Plenty (300), Lakes (163), Hawke’s Bay (253), MidCentral (321), Whanganui (123), Taranaki (263), Tairāwhiti (73), Wairarapa (83), Capital and Coast (459), Hutt Valley (240), Nelson Marlborough (294), Canterbury (1,306), South Canterbury (164), Southern (929), West Coast (93).
Six people's locations were unknown.
It takes the seven-day rolling average of new community cases to 8475. That's an increase from last Saturday's figure of 8283.
The number of active cases in the community is 59,300. These cases were detected in the past week and are not yet classified as recovered.
Nationwide, there are 494 people in hospital with Covid-19. Of those, 15 are in ICU or in a high dependency unit.
A further 55 cases were found at the border in the past 24 hours.
On Friday, the ministry announced 9390 new cases and 13 more deaths of people with Covid-19.
SHARE ME