Daily case reports of confirmed Covid-19 cases are published on the Ministry of Health website each afternoon. Newsroom has charted some of the numbers to help give a picture of Covid-19’s spread into the New Zealand.
Yesterday, Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield confirmed there were 50 new cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand, up from the previous day’s 40 new cases.
The Ministry of Health is now including probable cases in its total. A confirmed case is one which has a positive test result.
Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield explained: “In probable cases, the person has returned a negative laboratory result but the clinician treating the person has diagnosed them as a probable case due to their exposure history and clinical symptoms.”
Yesterday’s total of 50 new cases included 47 confirmed cases and three probable cases.
The below chart only includes confirmed cases.
The number of confirmed cases continues to increase daily. Bloomfield said this is something he expects to continue as returning New Zealanders develop symptoms over the next 10 days.
“The numbers will continue to increase before they turn around.”
Five new cases are linked to Marist College in in Auckland. A number of staff are now being tested as they are showing symptoms.
The new cases confirmed yesterday included a number of 20 year-olds. The previous day’s data showed 20-year-olds as the third most infected age bracket behind 60 and 40 year-olds, yesterday they jumped to first place.
Another change from the previous day’s data is the gap between male and female cases has narrowed. Forty-four percent of cases were female, the latest figure is 48 percent.
International travel is still the biggest cause of New Zealand’s Covid-19 infections, with 58 percent of confirmed infections being linked to travelling. Eight percent of cases are people who have been close contacts with confirmed cases. There are four cases of suspected community transmission.
Information is still being gathered on several cases to determine their cause.
Auckland remains the Covid-19 capital of New Zealand with 18 new cases yesterday, followed by Wellington with 12.
Information on each new case is gathered to determine whether it is linked to travel, a known case, or if it’s community transmission. Yesterday Wellington cleared a backlog of cases, finding several were associated with a group trip to New York.
Bloomfield said he expects contact tracing to become easier once the lockdown is in place because each person is likely to have fewer contacts.
Covid-19 has now killed more people – 18,900 – than other recent pandemics. However, it’s still not as deadly as smallpox which killed around 56 million people, or the bubonic plague which is estimated to have caused the death of 200 million.
