Canterbury's total number of Covid-19 cases has grown by 15 in the last 24 hours, with the region's total now standing at 114.
At Wednesday's update, Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield revealed 50 new cases in New Zealand, bringing the national total to 1210.
Canterbury continues to have the fifth-highest number of cases behind Southern, Waitemata, Waikato and Auckland district health board areas.
South Canterbury has ten positive Covid-19 cases, the same number as yesterday.
Dr Bloomfield was joined by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at today's update.
Dr Bloomfield said today's 50 new cases were made up of 26 confirmed cases and 24 probable cases.
There are 12 people in hospital, including four in ICU, two in a critical condition.
Dr Bloomfield commented on the number of medical staff with Covid-19, saying 20 support and care workers, working in both hospitals and in the community, 17 nurses, seven administrative staff, seven doctors and three medical students had tested positive Covid-19.
Many of those positive tests were linked to overseas travel.
Dr Bloomfield said priority groups receiving the flu jab should do so as it was classed as essential travel, and practices would provide the proper physical distancing.
There were 4098 tests yesterday, the highest number so far, bringing the total to 46,875.
Stock for tests was about 50,000, Dr Bloomfield said.
Health Minister David Clark told Parliament’s Epidemic Response Committee current advice was against widespread testing.
He said particular places of outbreak though could be tested more broadly as a "surveillance" measure of the spread of the disease "perhaps around our medical workforce, or particular places of outbreak".
"And I am aware that the ministry are particularly looking at how we best do surveillance, how we look at the patterns of spread across the country and get a better understanding of it in a situation where people are at home, predominantly," he said.
"The encouraging thing that we are seeing is that as more testing is being done the number of cases are not going up commensurately. So, the number of cases per test being done is dropping at this stage — and that is an encouraging sign."
Dr Bloomfield said he was "increasingly confident" the lockdown was working but as the country’s contact-tracing improved, and moved on to an electronic platform to link with laboratory testing data, this week the Ministry of Health would be able to show the pattern of testing by region.
Meanwhile, in a statement last night, the Southern District Health Board said 418 elective operations had been postponed as southern hospitals prepared for Covid-19 cases.
