Health officials have confirmed a person who previously returned a "weak positive" test result in Northland has now been confirmed with Covid-19.
Whangārei Mayor Sheryl Mai said the top of the North Island was on tenterhooks to see if Covid had spread across Northland after the positive case was confirmed.
"We are holding our breath and hoping that we don't have Covid in Whangārei or Northland," the mayor told The AM Show today.
Mai told Newstalk ZB they were keen to get as accurate information as possible about locations of interest. She believed the case was an essential worker that had travelled to Auckland and back again. She hoped they had been using QR codes so they could be informed of locations.
South Auckland vaccination rate worrying
The fight to beat the Delta outbreak is not being helped by poor vaccination rates in some of the South Auckland suburbs where cases have continued to pop up, including parts of Māngere, Clover Park, Manurewa, Papakura, and Favona.
Health researcher Dr Rawiri Taonui said Delta had spread at a higher rate among Māori after Auckland dropped down to alert level 3.
"It's spreading into the marginalised periphery of the Māori community - and that's happened during the second week of the move to level 3 in Auckland."
Taonui told TVNZ the evidence for that was the number of random cases showing up in hospitals, the rising number of positive cases within gangs, the number of cases in transitional housing and even yesterday's reported link to the Auckland City Mission.
Asked what he thought the current overall full vaccination rate among Māori was now, he said: "Just over 30 percent. It's lower than what the Government says."
Taonui said a person who is unvaccinated is 27 times more likely to be get infected by Covid, compared to a person who is fully vaccinated. An unvaccinated person is 80 to 90 times more likely to be hospitalised, based on general figures.
For Māori, the chances of being hospitalised after getting Covid-19 are "probably more than 100 times more likely than a fully vaccinated person".
"They're really, really serious numbers. With the case confirmed in Whāngārei last night and Delta already in four or five towns in the Waikato, there's a real risk of Delta moving into high demographic Māori areas with very low rates of vaccination.
"So Northland, the Lakes District, Bay of Plenty, bit further south into the King Country and Taranaki. If we start seeing more than 50 cases a day and then maybe 100, then we're looking at a very serious situation akin to 1918.
"Akin to 1918 - the Spanish flu - in my opinion. I don't want to be right, but I think that that's what the numbers are starting to tell us."
The developments come as the level 3 boundary in the Waikato was widened from midnight last night to include the Waitomo District, including Te Kuiti, and the Waipā and Ōtorohanga districts. Two new cases of Covid have also emerged on Auckland's North Shore.
