1 New Case Of COVID-19

There is one new community case of COVID-19 to report in New Zealand today.

The new case has an epidemiological link to an existing case and is associated with the Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship bereavement events group.

There are a number of inter-related cases and contacts who may have been involved with both the Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship sub-cluster, and the bereavement sub-cluster. 
We have worked with ARPHS to refine our information to more clearly identify those whose source of infection occurred at the bereavement events. 
As a result, we can now say there are 33 cases in the Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship group and 13 cases in the bereavement sub-cluster, which includes the cases whose source of infection was the bereavement events.

Church leaders are actively encouraging all members of the congregation to be retested, and at 8am this morning our laboratories had registered new tests for 82 per cent of the congregation. We want to thank them for their participation in contributing to our efforts to control the wider Auckland cluster.

We ask that the privacy of people who are part of the Fellowship be respected – nobody asks for COVID-19 to come into their home, workplace, or place of worship.

The Ministry has received reports of people associated with the Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship being pursued by media. This is creating stress and, crucially, hindering public health work as these people are becoming reluctant to answer their phones.

It is also creating a sense of stigma which is again unhelpful for public health efforts – we need people to be forthcoming and cooperative with testing and contact tracing.

Those affected by the virus need our collective support, and we need their cooperation to ensure COVID-19 does not spread further in our communities.

Numbers

There are now 70 people linked to the community cluster who remain in the Auckland quarantine facility, which includes 55 people who have tested positive for COVID-19 and their household contacts.

Since August 11, our contact tracing team has identified 3,623 close contacts of cases, of which 3,608 have been contacted and are self-isolating, and we are in the process of contacting the rest.

Today there are three people in hospital with COVID-19 – one is in isolation on a ward in Auckland City Hospital. Two are in ICU, at North Shore and Waikato hospitals.

With today’s new case and seven additional recovered cases, our total number of active cases is 114. Of those, 39 are imported cases in MIQ facilities, and 75 are community cases.

Our total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 is now 1,442, which is the number we report to the World Health Organization.

Yesterday our laboratories processed 8,953 tests, bringing the total number of tests completed to date to 848,420.

Henderson North School

One of the cases reported yesterday is a student at Henderson North School.

The student is a household contact of a previously reported case, and as such had been in isolation and had been tested for COVID-19.

They were not infectious when they last attended school and there are no close contacts among the Henderson North School community.

The risk to any students or staff is considered to be very low, and the school remains open.

NZ COVID Tracer

There are now 2,181,800 users registered on NZ COVID Tracer.

The app has recorded a total of 51,939,563 poster scans, with the daily number over two million every day this month.

Users have created 2,705,019 manual diary entries in NZ COVID Tracer.

There have been 366,041 QR codes created to be displayed around the country.

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