No New Community Cases; 7 Cases Of COVID-19 In Managed Isolation

There are no new COVID-19 community cases to report today and 7 new positive COVID-19 border-related cases in managed isolation since our last update on Tuesday.

The seven-day rolling average of new cases detected at the border is 5.

The total number of active cases in New Zealand today is 81.

Our total number of confirmed cases is 2,175.

Since 1 January 2021, there have been 43 historical cases, out of a total of 363 cases.  
 

*This case is considered a close contact of a case reported yesterday.

*This case is considered a close contact of a case reported yesterday.

Auckland February cluster

Public health officials yesterday, 6 April, classified the Auckland February cluster as closed.

This is based on yesterday being 28 days after the last identified case in the cluster was classified as recovered.

The first cases in this cluster were reported to the Ministry of Health on 13 February.

The cluster was made up of 15 community cases.

All the cases in the cluster were able to be linked epidemiologically and through Whole Genome Sequencing.

The source of the outbreak has not been determined.

Testing update

On Tuesday, 3,389 tests were processed.

In the past 7 days, 24,000 tests have been processed, with a seven-day rolling average up to yesterday of 3,429 tests processed.

The total number of tests processed by laboratories to date is 1,920,966.

Up-to-date information on all testing locations nationwide is available on the Healthpoint website:

https://www.healthpoint.co.nz/covid-19/

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Vaccination dashboard

Our key vaccination statistics are now posted on an online vaccination dashboard, which will be updated on Wednesday each week.

https://www.health.govt.nz/covid19vaccinedata

The dashboard provides a snapshot of vaccination progress, including:

· The number of people to receive their first vaccination

· The number of people to receive their second vaccination

· A graph which indicates the number of vaccinations administered each week vs the planned numbers.

Over the last week we’ve seen a small gap open between planned and actual vaccinations. This is largely due to Easter, with both vaccinators taking a well-earned break and people, understandably, prioritising friends and family over getting a vaccination.

The dashboard also has:

· Vaccinations administered on a given day

· The number of first and second doses administered by individual district health boards

· Vaccinations by ethnicity (Māori, Pacific Peoples, Asian, and European/other and unknown), age and sex.

We’re also reporting on adverse reactions following immunisation.

Medsafe, New Zealand’s medicines regulator, will this afternoon publish its initial report on safety monitoring of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on its website. The report will cover reported adverse events following immunisation.

Medsafe will continue to provide updated information each week. Providing this information, which many other countries are also doing, is standard practice for Medsafe and making it publicly available is part of our commitment to transparency and ensuring people can access this information easily.

NZ COVID Tracer App new version release

The Ministry will be releasing a new version of the NZ COVID Tracer app later this week.

The new features will include:

· the dashboard showing how many days out of the past 14 you’ve used the app;

· the dashboard showing figures on how many New Zealanders are using the app – the same as the figures released regularly by the Ministry; and,

· a flashlight option for scanning in low light conditions – particularly useful for the winter months ahead.

Thank you to everyone who is using the app regularly and who has turned on Bluetooth tracing. Bluetooth tracing is now enabled on more than 1.2 million devices.

We’ve seen the value of the app when we’ve had cases of COVID-19 in the community.

Using the NZ COVID Tracer app is one of the things we can all do to help contact tracing go faster when a case is detected and stop the virus from spreading.

NZ COVID Tracer now has 2,774,952 registered users.

Total poster scans have reached 241,555,263 and users have created 9,034,132 manual diary entries.

In the 24 hours to midday yesterday, there have been 728,127 poster scans.

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