A large number of new Covid cases in the Delta outbreak are among people living in transitional or emergency housing, with health officials now going to at-risk accommodation to test.
It comes as there was 45 new community cases on Wednesday, with most of the contacts household or close contacts. Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said that the spread had impacted some large households.
On top of that, "quite a proportion of our cases at the moment are among groups of people in transitional or emergency housing".
"The teams are working very hard with a range of agencies to support those people. Those are people, who by in very nature of the housing arrangements they are in, are moving around for a range of reasons and may have been through Alert Level 4 and 3," Dr Bloomfield said.
Dr Bloomfield said they had identified 40 medium to high-risk transitional or emergency housing-hostel locations, particularly in south Auckland, and testers would be going out over the next couple of weeks.
They would be following up with vaccinations as well.
"Most definitely it requires a different approach to engaging, following up with and supporting people in transitional and emergency housing," Dr Bloomfield said.
"There is a range of reasons they are there, so they require a range of health and social supports."
Clinical Director of the National Hauora Coalition Dr Rawiri McKree Jansen told 1News that "predictably Covid Delta has reached into communities that are more vulnerable, they have higher social needs, more complex social needs".
Displaced people in transitional or boarding houses are often distrustful of authority and don't use mainstream media channels, Dr Jansen explained.
"The virus travelling in those communities is much harder for us to contain. It means we must work harder."
"These are families who will have complex needs... let's reach in and do a good job of that, and then we can provide them with information about Covid and the vaccination programme which they can understand.
"We've got to have alternative channels to reach those communities, to give them trusted valuable information that they need now."
"We need to be understandable and then we can get into the complexity of all of the contact tracing and who's been visiting and where have people gone."
Dr Jansen said it was a failing that those communities were not prioritised in the vaccination rollout.
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