Southern Lakes Covid-19 - 4 more cases

Queenstown Lakes Covid 19 cases have risen from 59 to 63 in the last 24 hours, with Central Otago unchanged at 12. The Southern District as a region has risen overnight by 9 to a new total of 160, the highest of any DHB region in New Zealand.

The SDHB and Ministry of Heath continue to refuse to divulge any further breakdown, citing privacy, meaning that we don't know the distribution of cases between Queenstown, Wanaka and Cromwell.

Here's all the latest data from the SDHB and Ministry of Health as well as the latest full media release from the Ministry of Health.

Here is the latest full media briefing from the Ministry of Health.

"Today there are 48 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 41 new probable cases. There are no additional deaths to report.

There are now 156 reported cases which we can confirm have recovered.

The combined total of confirmed and probable cases in New Zealand is 1039.

This is 89 more than yesterday.

Today there are 15 people in hospital, including 3 in ICU – 1 in Wellington, 2 in Auckland. 2 are in a critical condition.

From our lab numbers, we can report a 7 day rolling average of tests at 2448 per day.  The total of lab tests to date is 36,209 and 3093 tests were carried out yesterday.  As mentioned yesterday, we know we have capacity to do the number of tests needed.

For those cases we have information on, we are still seeing a strong link to overseas travel (45%), as well as links to confirmed cases within New Zealand (36%) including those in clusters we already know about and community transmission (1%).

There is still a proportion of cases where the transmission type continues to be investigated – around 18% as at today.

We now have 12 significant clusters. The clusters with the highest number of associated cases remains the same as yesterday:  the wedding in Bluff (58), the event in Matamata (56) and the Marist College cluster in Auckland (66).

The ethnicity breakdown of the confirmed cases is:

European – 74%
Asian – 8.3%
Maori 7.6%
Pacific 3.3%.

More details are available on our website.

www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-current-situation/covid-19-current-cases


Contact tracing

There's been a significant increase in New Zealand's ability to carry out contact tracing.

In March, the Government announced a dedicated $500 million fund to help protect New Zealanders and their health around COVID-19. That announcement included a near doubling in resources for Public Health Units specifically to increase capacity for contact tracing.

This included standing up a new contact tracing workforce, the National Close Contact Service based at the Ministry in Wellington which supports the great work being done by PHUs and DHB.

As of Saturday, 4909 close contacts had been traced by the NCCS since it was stood up on March 24, with 702 contacts traced in a single day on Thursday.

It's now making more than 2 thousand calls a day, has a team of 190 people that work in shifts. "