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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Director General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield are providing an update on Covid-19 numbers.

• More than 100 charged with lockdown breaches

Dr Bloomfield confirmed there were 83 new community cases to report today.

Eighty-two of them were in Auckland, one is in Wellington, he said.

The Wellington case is a close contact of a known case and has been in isolation and was not out in public while infectious, he confirmed. 

These new cases bring the current outbreak total to 511 cases.

Of these cases, 453 are epidemiologically linked and 58 are yet to have a link established.

There are 34 people in hospital. 32 are in stable in a ward, two are in stable condition in ICU.

Locations of interest are being removed from the MoH website after 18 days. After that, officials are no longer worried about the risk of transmission.

As of 10am Sunday there were more than 32,000 contacts.

All residents in the Warkworth rest home which was listed as a location of interest have so far returned negative tests - good news, says Bloomfield.

Ongoing wastewater testing was occurring, with 125 sites tested through the outbreak.

There are no new detections in wastewater samples collected.

Bloomfield said a number of samples are being collected today and tomorrow from nine sites across Christchurch. This will give them confirmation there are no positive cases. 

Over half of the total cases yesterday were household contacts. Ardern said this shows how infectious Delta is.

Only two were infectious before level 4 restrictions rolled out. 

Covid-19 vaccine update

Yesterday 77,965 vaccines were administered. Of these 55,779 were first doses and 22,177 were second doses.

More than 3.28 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine have been administered to date. 

Of these, over 2.1 million are first doses and more than 1.14 million are second doses.

More than 194,133 Māori have received their first vaccination. Of these, more than 104,146 have also had their second vaccinations.

More than 125,495 doses first doses have been administered to Pacific peoples. Of these, more than 70,754 have also received their second doses.

Earlier

Earlier today is was reveled a worker at a managed isolation facility has tested positive for Covid.

The Ministry of Health says an investigation is under way into how the staff member at the Four Points by Sheraton in central Auckland was infected, reports RNZ.

But a spokesperson says they are potentially linked to the community outbreak. Whole genome sequencing is being undertaken to confirm their source of infection.

The Auckland Regional Public Health Service is identifying a small number of close contacts. All workers in managed isolation facilities wear appropriate PPE.

Meanwhile, an Auckland University medical expert says it's "entirely predictable" case numbers are increasing and he is not particularly concerned, given the lag in testing.

"My suspicion is that level four is working very well and that cases have already peaked but we may see a delay in reporting [the numbers]," Auckland University School of Medicine Professor Des Gorman told Newstalk ZB's Francesca Rudkin today.

"The thing we we have to look for are infections arising after lockdown and the groups to watch, of course, will be the essential workers."

Gorman agreed with modellers who said the outbreak would peak early this week with the caveat there was the lag in reporting cases and people getting tested.

He said clearly there were different ways of looking at the numbers following the announcement of 82 cases yesterday - the highest daily number in the outbreak so far - and other other experts suggesting Auckland might need tighter lockdown restrictions, amid fears of an even longer period in alert level four.

"I know that other people see all sorts of dragons there... they might eventually be proven to be right but there's no evidence to support their particular argument at the moment that something is happening, other than spread within households.

"I think we've got to be careful that people declare their biases and their conflicts when they start reporting on these sorts of things because in fact the public's very vulnerable to information which is either alarmist or depressing and I don't think you motivate people by fear.

"I think you motivate people by knowledge and information. If I said to you 'look, there's no reward for being vaccinated and this is terrible we will all be locked up to Christmas', you might as well go for a walk and catch up with your friends because if it's all hopeless, there's no point. So I actually think we've got to look at the data, realistically, but there's nothing wrong with actually not taking a pessimistic view to it."

He said he was confident "we can eliminate this outbreak".

"I am confident we can get the vaccination level up to the sorts of numbers we need... but do I think elimination is a long term strategy? No I don't. I don't think it's possible to maintain an elimination strategy if no one else in the world is. That means you have to rely on a very hard border which is not compatible with our society, and means you have to rely on frequent lockdowns which means you run out of money and goodwill. Lockdowns now, while we are getting vaccinated, are the right thing to do - long term, they are not."

'The curve is bending but not fast enough'

Earlier, Aucklanders were being warned to manage their expectations ahead of a review of alert level settings on Monday, with one modeller warning another "terrible week" of high daily case numbers is on the cards.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern warned on Friday that Aucklanders are likely to spend at least another fortnight living under alert level 4 restrictions, saying she needed "to see a sustained reduction in cases before moving alert levels".

Just how long will be revealed when Ardern fronts her post-Cabinet press conference on Monday afternoon. What Aucklanders do know is that they will not be joining the rest of the country in level 3 when it moves down the alert levels on Tuesday night.

Ardern is also readying plans to maintain the cracking pace of the country's vaccine rollout, which has jabbed about 90,000 people a day the past two days.

The Government is concerned that supplies of the vaccine might not be able to satisfy demand, and is readying plans to import more vaccines.

The Herald revealed this morning this could included changing vaccination schedules or using non-Pfizer jabs.

Experts suggest that signs point towards an extended lockdown in Auckland, and possibly harsher alert level restrictions if daily case numbers do not start plateauing or tracking downwards.

The country clocked 82 new cases of Covid-19 on Saturday, all of them in Auckland.

The ministry has also confirmed that 55 per cent of Covid cases who have tested positive since the lockdown were infectious in the community, increasing the likelihood the virus has spread further.

However most of those exposure events were prior to alert level 4 restrictions being imposed.

Covid-19 modeller Shaun Hendy, who had provided advice to the Government on its response said Saturday's case numbers were "discouraging".

"We would like to see those numbers start to come down."

Hendy said he was hoping the case load would just be a "blip" in the plateau.

"We do expect cases to plateau over the next few days. There will always be some noise in the data."

He said there were shoots of optimism in the fact that new cases were clearly linked to existing ones.

"I wouldn't say it's ringfenced exactly yet. While [new cases] are still in existing clusters you can't say it's out of control," he said.

"We're starting to see the effects of alert level 4, I suspect we are still seeing a lot of household transmission," Hendy said.

The advice came with a warning however, that if cases did not level off, it might be necessary to tighten up alert level 4 restrictions by shutting some supermarkets and being more selective about which businesses can open.

Fellow modeller Rodney Jones was more pessimistic.

"We had a terrible week last week - this looks like next week will not be any better."

Jones warned that the growth in cases still looked to be "exponential" despite director general of health Ashley Bloomfield saying that it was not.

"It is not right to say it is not exponential. Anything with an R value above one is an exponential rise in cases," Jones said.

He said asking when cases would plateau was "the wrong question".

"You can't ask that question with Delta - Delta behaves differently. It works differently to the wild form. It has shorter waves. You have a day or two where you think you are getting on top of it. Then you get hit by a bad day," he said.

"The curve is bending but not fast enough."

Jones said the Government should not make the mistake other countries had made by focusing on whether transmission was only occurring within households .

"The point is Delta is ferocious and it represents another challenge. We are going to have to come up with something more."