Director of Public Health Dr Caroline McElnay has confirmed there are 68 new community cases of Covid-19 to report today.

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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and McElnay provided the update this afternoon.

Today's new cases bring the total to 277. 

Of those 277, 34 people had received one dose of the Pfizer vaccine and 10 were fully vaccinated, McElnay said.

The numbers come as the Government begins to consider whether it can lift alert levels anywhere in the country outside of Auckland. That decision will be announced tomorrow.

One previously reported community case has been deemed a "false positive" and has been taken off the overall total. 

Of those 277 cases, 263 are in Auckland and 14 are in Wellington.

The two new Wellington cases announced today are household contacts of previous positive cases.

There remain no community cases of the Delta variant in the South Island.

Fifteen of the current community cases are in a stable condition in hospital; there are no cases in ICU. Of these, three are in North Shore Hospital, seven are in Middlemore Hospital, and five are in Auckland City Hospital.

There are still six sub-clusters. The Birkdale Social Network cluster has 35 confirmed cases and the Mangere church cluster has 114 cases.

There are 495 locations of interest - but only three new ones were added today. A rugby game was added that was pre lockdown, and two supermarket visits post lockdown.

24,402 contacts have been formally identified since 8am today. Sixty-five per cent have been followed up by contact tracers and individuals are self-isolating. Seventy-one per cent of all close contacts have had a test.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo: NZ Herald

We are in a very similar place to yesterday, Ardern said. The numbers are not unexpected, she said.

Out of more than 60 cases logged yesterday, only three reported new exposure events.

Thirty-seven of the cases are from within households that already had a case, Ardern said.

Of 60+ cases reported yesterday, 16 remain under investigation. Across 400+ locations of interest reported, 13 currently have generated additional cases.

The lockdown is having an impact, Ardern said.

There isn't spread of the virus beyond Auckland and Wellington. If it weren't for lockdown, I'm sure we would have seen cases spread further she said.

"With Delta, people are infectious much sooner and appear to give it more people. We can expect the lag time in our numbers to be longer, and bigger," Ardern said.

She said we need to be "incredibly vigilant".

Experts are telling the Government to stick to the elimination strategy, Ardern said.

The collective goal is to move away from lockdown measures and vaccines help us do that, the Prime Minister said. She said it's not the Government's intention to use lockdown measures "forever".

There were more than 87,000 vaccine doses administered yesterday, meaning more than 3 million doses have been given overall.

After people over 30 years of age were made eligible for the vaccine yesterday a record more than 270,000 bookings were made.

Yesterday New Zealand labs processed 41,739 swabs nationwide.

In Wellington, 3303 swabs were processed and more than 20,000 swabs were processed across Auckland yesterday.

Twenty-three community testing centres are open in Auckland today.

There are six regular testing centres, and 12 pop up centres. Today is expected to be another busy day at testing centres.

Wastewater testing finds traces of virus in Christchurch samples

Covid-19 has been detected in samples collected from the Christchurch catchment on 21 and 23 August following previous negative results.

However, there are at least three positive cases in MIQ facilities in Christchurch and these results are consistent with virus shedding from those cases, which we have seen previously. Further samples will be taken from around Christchurch today, with results expected by the end of the week. All other South Island sites are negative.

Further samples are being collected from Warkworth following the previous positive results.

In the Wellington region, Covid-19 has only been detected in samples collected from the Moa Point site in Southern Wellington and is considered to reflect known cases shedding in the catchment.

No new Auckland samples have been analysed since yesterday’s report.