Thursday December 23

There are 56 new community cases of Covid-19 today.

Of these, 42 are in Auckland, 4 in Waikato, 6 in Bay of Plenty, 2 in Lakes, 1 in Tairāwhiti and 1 in Taranaki. 

The case in Tairāwhiti’s case was tested and is currently located in the Tauranga area. This case has been officially transferred to Tairāwhiti’s case numbers as they have a permanent Tairāwhiti address.

There are 48 people in hospital, with 7 of those people in intensive care or high dependency units.

The average age of people currently in hospital is 49.

95% percent of New Zealand's eligible population have had the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, and 91% percent have had a second dose.

There have been 4,488,461 vaccine pass downloads, including 28,877 in the last 24 hours.

Hawke's Bay and Waikato district health boards are next in line to hit the 90 percent fully vaccinated mark.

After Covid-19 was detected in wastewater samples from Napier on December 15,19 and 20, the virus was not detected in a sample collected on December 21.

A follow-up sample has been collected for analysis.

The recent wastewater detections in the area may be due to undetected community transmission or a recently recovered case returning to the region shedding the virus, but is no longer infectious.

Click here for a list of updated locations of interest.

Top image: Man wearing double face mask and waiting for the covid-19 vaccination September 20 2021. Photo: Janice Chen/iStock

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