There were 22,535 new community cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand on Friday, including 1163 in Canterbury and 63 in South Canterbury.
There are 562 people with Covid-19 in hospitals across the country, including 11 in ICU, the Ministry of Health said.
There are eight people with Covid-19 in Canterbury hospitals.
The average age of people in hospital is 53.
Today's new community cases (PCR & RAT) are in Northland (515), Auckland (13,252), Waikato (1,674), Bay of Plenty (1,248), Lakes (464), Hawke’s Bay (325), MidCentral (364), Whanganui (79), Taranaki (257), Tairāwhiti (155), Wairarapa (69), Capital and Coast (1,356), Hutt Valley (577), Nelson Marlborough (304), Canterbury (1,163), South Canterbury (63), Southern (632), West Coast (16); Unknown (14).
There are eight new cases at the border today.
The ministry says there are 152,358 active community cases in the country today. The total number of cases since the pandemic began is 187,964.
This morning, the Canterbury DHB said there are 7452 active cases in the region today. On Thursday, it reported 6311 active cases.
While the number of new cases in New Zealand is down on Thursday's high of 23,183, hospitalisations are up with 503 yesterday. The ministry reported 1294 new community cases in Canterbury yesterday and 53 in South Canterbury.
A person who died of an unrelated medical condition in Dunedin on Thursday while receiving palliative care had tested positive for Covid-19.
The case is one of five new deaths reported by the ministry today.
The four others all had unrelated medical conditions but tested positive for the coronavirus. They were in Tauranga, Waikato and Middlemore (2) hospitals.
Some of the deaths are being announced today as they were only recently notified in the ministry's national reporting systems.
Retesting advised
The ministry said in a statement it was seeing reports of people who are symptomatic testing negative for Covid-19 in their initial test but later returning a positive test.
"Our advice is that even if you receive a negative test, you should stay at home until well and retest if symptoms persist or worsen."
It also advised wearing a mask when people were out and about.
Masks reduced the risk of a person both catching and spreading the virus, said the ministry.
The ministry said more than 130,000 orders were placed through the RAT requester site for free Rapid Antigen Tests yesterday, covering more than half a million people, or about 2 million tests.
"The Ministry wants to reassure people that we have enough RATs to help New Zealand through a widespread Omicron outbreak in the coming months. Over the past week, 8.8m million RATs have been distributed. Over the weekend, another 8m RATs are expected to arrive in the country with another 99 million confirmed for delivery this month."
- ODT Online/NZ Herald
