There are 62 new cases of Covid-19 in the community today, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield has confirmed.

In this afternoon's press conference, Dr Bloomfield says one of the new community cases is in Wellington.

There is also one new case in managed isolation.

There are 12 people in hospital with the virus, Bloomfield says, an increase of three, with 11 of those associated with the outbreak. None of those associated with the outbreak are in ICU.

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He says the majority of links between cases are in households or workplaces, and there are some cases that have been at a location of interest.

Bloomfield offers a shout out to the Pacific community in Auckland and community leaders for stepping up their testing and vaccinations. He says it is Pacific communities that have had the highest testing rates in the outbreak.

The two biggest sub-clusters are the Samoan Assembly of God Church in south Auckland's Māngere and the Birkdale Social Network cluster associated with case A. He says there is a 14-case cluster associated with Massey households and workplaces, and the rest have less than 10 cases so he will not go into further detail.

There are six sub-clusters in total.

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Bloomfield says about 40 new locations of interest have been released today, which he says is a much smaller number than previous days.

He says as a matter of public interest the ministry is now publishing case data including gender, ethnicity and age group breakdowns. That will be updated daily.

As of 9am there were 20,383 contacts formally identified. More than 12,717 of those have been formally contacted, and 62 percent have returned a test result.

He says in the next few days there will be over 1200 contact tracers in call centres around the country.

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There are 22 community testing centres across Auckland including a new on at Mountford Park in Manurewa, he says.

There was a further detection of Covid-19 in wastewater in Warkworth from a couple of days ago, he says, so further testing is being done there.

Wastewater from more than 70 locations covering more than 3.6 million people have been tested, he says, and apart from in Auckland, Warkworth and Wellington there have been no other positive results.

There were 41 new cases of Covid-19 in the community yesterday, taking the total number of cases to 148 a day after the country's lockdown was extended.

Yesterday, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said the largest of the six clusters of cases in Auckland and Wellington was associated with the Assembly Of God Church in Māngere.

Reporting by RNZ

Republished by Arrangement