There are 8730 new Covid-19 community cases in New Zealand on Wednesday, Dr Ashley Bloomfield has announced.
The numbers were reported over the last 24 hours.
808 people are in hospital with the virus, 14 less than Tuesday.
25 people are in ICU or a high dependency unit, one more than Tuesday.
The average age of those in hospital with Covid-19 is 65.
The seven-day rolling average of Covid hospitalisations is 782, up from 766 a week ago.
Dr Ashley Bloomfield provided the update on Wednesday July 27. (Source: 1News)
On Covid-19 hospitalisations, Bloomfield - the Director-General of Health - said the "worst case scenario" was now unlikely to eventuate.
“While there is still a chance… hospital occupancy could still reach more than 1000 occupied beds (with Covid-19 patients), we are tracking closer to a peak of 850, and we got close to that over the weekend”.
“We know that hospitalisations tend to track about a week behind cases and we have seen the cases dropping.”
The deaths of 45 more people with Covid-19 were reported on Wednesday.
Of the 45 people who have died, one was in their 40s, three were in their 50s, five were in their 60s, eight were in their 70s, 12 were in their 80s and 16 were aged over 90.
Twenty-five were women and 20 were men.
Three were from Northland, eight were from Auckland, one was from Waikato, three were from the Bay of Plenty, two were from the Lakes District, one was from Tairāwhiti, one was from the Hawke's Bay, one was from Taranaki, two were from Mid Central, three were from Whanganui, four were from the Wellington region, five were from Nelson Marlborough, eight were from Canterbury, and three were from Southern.
The latest deaths bring the total number of publicly reported deaths of people with Covid-19 to 2083.
The change in the total number of publicly reported deaths with Covid-19 is not equal to the number of new deaths reported today. This is because deaths that occurred more than 28 days after a positive test that are subsequently determined to be unrelated to Covid-19 are removed from the total.
"This is day two of our new approach to reporting deaths that are attributable to Covid-19 either as the underlying or contributing cause," Bloomfield said.
"There are now a total of 1427 deaths confirmed as attributable to Covid-19, either as the underlying cause or a contributing factor, and the seven-day rolling average of attributable deaths is now 17."
The seven-day rolling average of cases is 8111, down from 9367 a week ago.
Wednesday's positive cases, detected through rapid antigen tests (RATs) and PCR tests, are located in Auckland (770), the Bay of Plenty (381), Canterbury/West Coast (1209), Capital and Coast/Hutt (1067), Counties Manukau (855), Hawke's Bay (351), the Lakes District (196), Mid Central (380), Nelson Marlborough (231), Northland (257), South Canterbury (102), Southern (719), Tairāwhiti (60), Taranaki (229), Waikato (670), Wairarapa (75), Waitematā (1061), and Whanganui (114).
The location of 3 new cases is unknown.
There have been 394 new Covid-19 cases at the border in the last 24 hours.
A total of 4084 PCR tests were carried out in the last 24 hours, while 16,393 RAT test results were reported.
The number of active community cases is 56,750. They were identified in the past seven days but have not yet been classified as recovered.
Referring to the regions of new entity Health NZ, Bloomfield - the Director-General of Health - said “case rates are trending downward across all four regions in New Zealand.”
“This finding is supported by what we’re seeing from the wastewater results and the test positivity in our people being admitted to hospital.”
On Tuesday there were 9256 new Covid-19 community cases in New Zealand and 38 deaths reported.
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