No new community cases; 7 cases of COVID-19 in managed isolation
There are no new COVID-19 community cases and seven new positive Covid-19 border-related cases in managed isolation since yesterday.
Six of these new cases arrived from India via the United Arab Emirates on April 5 and tested positive on arrival. The seventh case arrived from the USA on March 22 and is considered a close contact of a case reported yesterday.
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 and the 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.
The Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, and Associate Minister of Health (Māori), Peeni Henare, provide an update on Covid-19 cases.
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.
The Ministry of Health thanked everyone who has and continues to use 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.
Auckland February cluster
Public health officials yesterday 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 February 13.
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.
