Covid 19 Omicron outbreak: 9809 Covid cases in last week, 54 virus-linked deaths including a child

New Zealand has recorded 9809 new Covid community cases in the last week.

There have been 54 virus-related deaths in that time.

One of those who died was less than 10 years old, one was in their 30s, two were in their 40s, two were in their 50s, seven were in their 60s, 11 were in their 70s, 16 were in their 80s and 14 were aged over 90. Of these people, 24 were women and 30 were men.

There are 166 people in hospital with the virus and eight in ICU.

Of the 9809, 1052 were reinfections and 244 of those were reinfections less than 90 days after the initial infection.

In the last week 9522 people have recovered.

Covid-19 detection in the wastewater of two of the North Island's biggest centres suggests that a large number of cases are going unreported.

Wastewater testing results from ESR show that there is actually a higher rate of the virus circulating in Auckland and Wellington than what is being reported.

This comes as the Ministry of Health has released its weekly update on the country's cases which was not released yesterday because of the public holiday for Queen Elizabeth II Memorial Day.

There were 9606 new cases in the community reported for the week between September 12 and 18.

Last week, deputy director general Public Health Agency Dr Andrew Old couldn't say what the impact of removing Covid restrictions such as the traffic light system would have on the country's situation.

At the time, he said the impacts could start to be seen in a week or two.

Old said they had seen a sustained decline in daily community cases and hospitalisation rates across all regions over the past five weeks.

He also said Covid-19 deaths had been consistently declining for the past seven weeks.

"Covid-19 case rates have tracked in line with expectations for the past few weeks and as expected this downward trend is starting to slow and come to a possible plateau."

Old expected case numbers to stay at the current levels for the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, a new Covid-19 variant, BQ.1, arrived in New Zealand last week with three cases detected at the border just before arrival testing was scrapped.

The new variant was said to be only incrementally different and there was no great change to the level of transmission.

Environmental Science and Research (ESR) professor Mike Bunce said the cases of the new variant were detected just before the dismantling of the Covid Protection Framework - or traffic light system.

The change on September 16 meant rapid-antigen tests (Rat) at the border were no longer a requirement.

"We would have preferred this to be kept in place because it gives us valuable information about the arrival of new variants," Bunce said.

He said there was an "absolute conveyor belt of variants" appearing at the border and that after a period of time if they kept appearing, there would be "leakage".

The BQ.1 variant was one that UK epidemiologists had been watching, he said.

Bunce said there had not been any community cases of BQ.1 detected.

BA.5 was still the primary variant in New Zealand.

Bunce said ESR was constantly looking at what was happening overseas, if variants were more transmissible and if they were causing more severe disease.