Thursday March 10

There are 845 people in hospital with Covid-19. This is the highest number of people in hospital with the virus than at any other point over the last two years.  

Along with the high number of hospitalisations, there are are 21,015 new cases of Covid-19 today.

Of these, 689 are in Northland, 7,234 are in Auckland, 2,016 in Waikato, 1,392 in Bay of Plenty, 632 in Lakes, 700 in Hawke's Bay, 653 in MidCentral, 156 in Whanganui, 524 in Taranaki, 353 in Tairāwhiti, 170 in Wairarapa, 1,858 in Capital and Coast, 1,103 in Hutt Valley, 449 in Nelson Marlborough, 2,021 in Canterbury, 109 in South Canterbury, 918 in Southern, 26 in West Coast, and 12 cases are unknown.

The total number of active cases is 208,625.

Hospitalisations

16 people are currently in intensive care or high dependency units. 

The average age of people currently in hospital is 54.

Covid-19 deaths

The Ministry of Health is changing the way they report Covid deaths.

From today, they will report all deaths of people who die within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19.

Today, the Ministry of Health confirmed 9 additional deaths, all of the people died within 28 days of having Covid-19. This brings the total of publicly-reported deaths to 91 to date. 

Of the nine deaths, one died yesterday in North Shore Hospital.

The remaining eight all died in the past fortnight - 4 in late February and 4 in March. 

7 of the deaths were in Auckland and one in Waikato. 

One was in their sixties, three in their seventies, two in their eighties, one in their nineties and one over 100 years of age.

A death reported yesterday in the Bay of Plenty was recently found not to be Covid-19 related.

As of today, 34 people have died and it's clear their causes of death were Covid-19.

Today, people who had Covid-19 when they died but their cause of death was not directly related to the virus is 2. 

48 people with Covid-19, who have died, are still having their deaths investigated. 

Testing

In a press conference, Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield shared details about what testing and genome sequencing had discovered about our community and hospitalised cases.

97 percent of cases reported today were diagnosed using Rapid Antigen Tests.

From then start of the year until now, 21 percent of people hospitalised from Covid-19, and had been genome sequenced, had the Delta variant and 79 percent had the Omicron variant.

However, of hospitalised cases genome sequenced in the last four weeks, none had the Delta variant.

Of the last 47 hospitalised and genome sequenced cases, all had Omicron, and the split between the BA-1 and BA-2 sub-variant was almost 50/50.

Of sequenced community cases, around two thirds of cases are the BA-2 sub-variant of Omicron.

Click here for a list of updated locations of interest. 

Top image: A Close-up of negative result by rapid antigen test for SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, held in hand over test document paper. RobertaX / iStock

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