There are 49 new Covid-19 cases in the community today, down from the 75 reported yesterday, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield has announced.
Bloomfield gave the latest figures during Thursday's 1pm Covid-19 briefing in Wellington alongside Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
The total number of cases in the current Delta outbreak is now 736 while New Zealand's confirmed cases to date since the pandemic began is 3340.
In the current outbreak there are 725 active cases; 709 cases are in Auckland, 16 are in Wellington and Bloomfield confirmed the remaining 11 have recovered.
Bloomfield said 36 per cent of yesterday's reported cases were infectious in the community while the remaining 64 per cent were isolated while infected.
Meanwhile, a worker at the Spring Hill corrections facility who tested positive for Covid-19 several days ago has subsequently returned negative tests, he said.
"Our investigations continue. At this stage, it remains a positive result under investigation as opposed to a positive case. However, all precautions remain in place as if this is an acute infection."
He said all Covid-19 tests to date for inmates and the worker's colleagues have come back negative.
Dr Ashley Bloomfield said told reporters "all precautions remain in place".
The cases break down to seven sub-clusters with the two largest groups being the Māngere church with 332 and Birkdale social network with 75.
Bloomfield said there are 42 cases in hospital, six of which are in ICU with three being ventilated. The youngest person in ICU is an 18-year-old. Bloomfield said the growing number of cases in hospital was a "stark reminder" of how serious Covid is.
The Director-General of Health also said there have been 37,359 contacts identified in the current outbreak of which 30,283 - or 81 per cent - have been contacted and self-isolating. Work is ongoing to follow up remaining contacts.
Bloomfield added 336 contacts in Northland have all been contacted by the Ministry of Health with 96 per cent returning negative test results. The remaining four per cent is being approached by authorities today.
Wastewater testing in Northland has also returned negative results as the region looks to move to Alert Level 3 alongside the rest of the country - besides Auckland - at 11:59pm on Thursday.
In addition, wastewater tests from around the country had no unexpected detections in the past 24 hours.
The locations of interests currently has 308 entries in it.
Another 89,546 vaccinations were administered yesterday, taking New Zealand's vaccinations to date to 3.59 million while another 17,683 tests were taken yesterday, making New Zealand's total number of tests to date to 3,024,268.
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