The South recorded a sixth straight day with no new Covid-19 cases yesterday, as the Ministry of Health revealed it has recorded almost no community transmission of the pandemic disease for the past fortnight.
Nationally, just five more cases of Covid-19 were announced yesterday, with the cause of all five either known or suspected.
"Over the past two weeks we are not seeing situations where we cannot identify how that person acquired their disease," director of public health Caroline McElnay said.
"That is telling us that we have extremely low levels, if any, of community transmission through unknown cases out there in the community."
That was the good news as New Zealand prepares to move to Alert Level 3 next week, but Dr McElnay tempered that by announcing another Covid-19-related death, the 17th of the outbreak.
The man, in his 60s, was the 10th person from the Rosewood Rest Home cluster in Christchurch to die from the disease.
"This illustrates, once again, the impact this disease can have, especially on vulnerable people," Dr McElnay said.
Of the 216 Covid-19 cases recorded in the southern region, 192 people have recovered and two have died.
Southern District Health Board medical officer of health Susan Jack said further random testing of people without Covid-19 symptoms would be carried out over the next few days to see if the region was in line with the national trend of no cases of community transmission of the disease.
Healthcare workers, people who had travelled overseas, Maori and Pacific Islanders and backpackers would be the focus of testing, which began yesterday with people in Queenstown hostels and short-term accommodation, Dr Jack said.
"We thank everyone for their co-operation in helping us learn as much as we can about the prevalence of the virus in our community, and helping to inform the extent to which we can relax the restrictions we’ve been living with in recent weeks as we’ve worked to control this outbreak."
Queenstown, the site of one of the largest clusters of Covid-19 cases, also had nurses at its hospital test positive for the disease.
WellSouth carried out random testing in a supermarket at the resort last week but no positives were returned from 343 tests.
SDHB chief executive Chris Fleming said some health services would resume once Alert Level 3 took effect on Tuesday.
Patients who had surgeries or appointments postponed due to the Alert Level 4 lockdown would be contacted about rescheduling, and medical staff would be looking at ways of providing more treatment while respecting anti Covid-19 measures such as social distancing.
Mr Fleming estimated more than 400 elective surgeries and 2500 outpatient appointments had been postponed due to Alert Level 4 restrictions.
"We need to acknowledge however that we do face a significant backlog, and constraints around delivering care will remain for some time," he said.
"We also believe there may be a ‘hidden waiting list’ of people who delayed seeking care during lockdown and whose conditions may be more acute when they present to us.
"Further, the stresses and economic impact of the pandemic will very likely bring further demands on our health services.
"However, everything we have seen in recent weeks gives me confidence in our teams to rise to these challenges."
