No New Community Cases; 1 Case Of COVID-19 In Managed Isolation

28 March 2021

There are no new community cases and 1 new COVID-19 border related case to report in managed isolation.

Grand Mercure managed isolation facility
The investigation continues into the ‘day 12’ case at the Grand Mercure managed isolation facility in Auckland.
As at 9am this morning, a total of 235 of the 258 returnees have now been contacted and 167 have returned negative test results so far.

COVID-19 case numbers
There is 1 new COVID-19 case to report in managed isolation. The seven-day rolling average of new cases detected at the border is 4.
The total number of active cases in New Zealand today is 75.
Our total number of confirmed cases is 2,126.
Since 1 January 2021, there have been 42 historical cases, out of a total of 314 cases.

Testing update

On Saturday, 4,265 tests were processed. 34,459 tests have been processed in the last week, with a seven-day rolling average up to yesterday of 4,923 tests processed.

The total number of tests processed by laboratories to date is 1,884,329.

For up-to-date information on all testing locations nationwide is available on the Healthpoint website https://www.healthpoint.co.nz/covid-19/.

Canterbury DHB software coding error update

Canterbury DHB is contacting individuals affected by a coding error in the software used in a local Canterbury medical appointment system. This potentially allowed those invited to make appointments to also view details about other individuals also making appointments.

The DHB rang 50 people last night, apologised and informed them of the actions now being taken. The key concern of many of those contacted was that their booked vaccinations would go ahead as planned – which they will. This process of contacting individuals continues today. Where individuals are unable to be contacted by phone, the DHB will be making contact through email.

A relatively small number of people were understandably upset. Again, the DHB has apologised and has also explained that the appointment system remains offline until the issue is rectified and the system thoroughly tested.

At this stage, the external booking issue is limited to Canterbury DHB and to household members of frontline border workers at that DHB who had been invited to make appointments to be vaccinated.

A handful of other DHBs had been considering a similar interim public booking system. They will now wait for the issues identified with the system to be rectified and checked before deciding whether to proceed.

Hutt Valley and Capital & Coast DHBs are using a different version of the booking system used in Canterbury, but access is password protected and only available to DHB staff on their internal network.

These two DHBs are reviewing the security of their internal system in light of the issues identified at Canterbury. The DHBs were not planning to use the public facing website that has caused the issue in Canterbury. No other DHBs are using the system for making COVID-19 vaccination appointments.

At this stage, there is no evidence of any malicious breach, access to this information or sharing of it further and the DHB is investigating further.

CDHB has confirmed the coding error meant that details of 714 individuals (2 fewer than initially reported yesterday) who had registered were potentially able to be viewed.

The details included name, gender, age, phone number and NHI number but no personal health information.

Individuals with questions or concerns about the booking system coding error should in the first instance ring Healthline on 0800 358 5453.

As at 11 am today, no calls from anyone affected had been made to Healthline.

A national booking system, using different software to Canterbury’s interim booking system, and using a different IT approach, is currently being developed by the Ministry of Health to support scaling of the vaccine programme.

NZ COVID Tracer

NZ COVID Tracer now has 2,766,471 registered users.

Total poster scans have reached 234,215,209 and users have created 8,834,478 manual diary entries. There have been 957,182 poster scans in the last 24 hours to 1pm yesterday.

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