Covid 19 coronavirus: Hawke's Bay has 707 new cases and 10 people in hospital

Vaccinator and swab tester Mere Timu Takes a RAT from Hastings woman Lu Videan. Photo / Paul Taylor

There are 707 new cases of Covid in Hawke's Bay, including 383 in Hastings, 254 in Napier, 37 in Central Hawke's Bay and 32 in Wairoa.

On Tuesday, there were now 10 people in Hawke's Bay hospital.

Overall the Ministry of Health announced 23,894 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday with 9081 of them in Auckland.

Director of Public Health Dr Caroline McElnay said 756 people were in hospital and 16 are in ICU or HDU.

This is an increase from daily cases reported from Saturday to Monday, which were below 20,000.

Care needs to be taken when interpreting daily reported cases, which are expected to fluctuate.

From March 1 to March 7, the seven day rolling average increased from 10,698 to 17,921, and over the same period, hospitalisations increased from 373 to 696.

The Ministry stated the numbers showed that Omicron was still spreading in our communities.

It advised the need to continue to wear a mask, physical distance, and get tested where required to reduce the spread of the virus.

Contributing factors to the decrease in case numbers seen in the previous few days are likely to have been either a lower level of testing and a lower level of self-reporting of RAT test results over the weekend, or a combination of both.

There are already a large number of people reporting their rapid test results online and we'd like to both thank them as well as continue to encourage people to self-report their RATs online (both positive and negative results) on My Covid Record – as soon as they have the test result.