There have been 24 Covid-19 deaths, including a child under 10, and 8454 new community cases in New Zealand today.

One of those deaths included a child under 10 years old and another young person between the age of 10 and 19.

In a statement, the Ministry of Health said 481 people were in hospital, including 14 in ICU.

The deaths include 12 people died over the past three days and an additional 12 people died since 5 March.

Delays to reporting can be associated with people dying with Covid-19, rather than from Covid-19, and the virus being discovered only after they have died.

The deaths take the total number of publicly-reported deaths with Covid-19 to 801 and the seven-day rolling average of reported deaths is 13.

Nine people who died were from Auckland, four from Waikato, two from Bay of Plenty, one from Whanganui, one from MidCentral, two from the Greater Wellington region, three from Canterbury and two from Southern.

One person was under 10, one was between 10 and 19 years old, two were in their 40s, one in their 50s, two in their 60s, nine in their 70s, five in their 80s and three were aged over 90.

Of these people, seven were female and 17 were male.

Earlier, today Minister of Health Andrew Little announced a special taskforce to tackle delays in hospital waiting lists caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Yesterday the ministry reported 20 deaths and 481 people were in hospital.