Another 16 people with Covid-19 have died and 496 people are in hospital with the virus, the Ministry of Health reported today.
There are 4489 new community cases of Covid - and Dr Andrew Old, deputy-director general of the Ministry of Health, says he is hopeful we've turned a corner with the virus.
He said broadly Covid community case numbers are trending downwards.
There are 13 people in ICU and 16 new Covid-related deaths.
"Pleasingly the case numbers in over 65s ... has also dropped for the fourth week running," he said.
"We are continuing to track at the lower of what modelling suggested this winter."
He said it seems we have passed the peak of the latest outbreak and were approaching our next plateau.
The next question was "how low will we go" in terms of daily cases, he said.
Case numbers in health workers had also declined for the fifth week running while wastewater detections had also dropped.
Hospitalisation numbers had also dropped in the past week, after weeks of hospital numbers remaining stubbornly high, Old said.
He said hospitalisation numbers tended to lag behind case numbers and so a reduction in hospitalisations indicated the transmission of Covid was falling.
There are now 1782 deaths attributed to Covid.
Old said because New Zealand had a low number of cases at the beginning of the outbreak, deaths in this country remained low compared to those elsewhere.
-NZ Herald and RNZ
