No Community Cases; No New Cases Of COVID-19; 1 Historical Case In Managed Isolation

There are no cases of COVID-19 to report in the community in New Zealand today.

There are no new cases of COVID-19 to report in recent returnees in managed isolation facilities since the Ministry’s update yesterday.

Nine previously reported cases have now recovered. The number of active cases in New Zealand is 32.

There is one new historical case to report. This person arrived on 1 July from Russia, via United Arab Emirates. They tested positive on day 3 during a routine test and they are currently in a Wellington managed isolation facility.

After an initial investigation, this case has now been confirmed as a historical case which is why we are adding it to today’s case tally.

In addition, a previously reported case from 28 June has now been reclassified as a historical case.

Since 1 January 2021, there have been 85 historical cases, out of a total of 593 cases.

The seven-day rolling average of new cases detected at the border is three.

Our total number of confirmed cases is 2,409.

Update on the Viking Bay 
The All of Government response to the Viking Bay continues to work through the logistics involved in the ship’s return to New Zealand.

Customs has advised the ship is expected to return to New Zealand early next week. Details including which port it will dock at are still being finalised and will be announced when confirmed.

The current plan is that crew onboard who are unwell will be taken off the ship using standard Infection Prevention and Control protocols, which involves the use of appropriate PPE.

They will then be transferred to a quarantine facility. A health management plan will be put in place for those who remain on board the Viking Bay. This approach both manages the risk to public health as well as allowing the provision of appropriate medical assistance to the crew.

Further protocols and procedures will be put in place to protect the safety and security of the Viking Bay while it is in port and mitigate the risk of infection outside the cohort of mariners.

Customs and public health officials are also continuing to monitor a second ship, reported yesterday, which will at this stage remain at sea.

The immediate health needs of crew on both ships are currently able to be appropriately managed on-board.

Testing update 
The total number of COVID-19 tests processed by laboratories to date is 2,339,666

On Thursday, 7,051 tests were processed across New Zealand.

The seven-day rolling average is 5,621.

For all testing locations nationwide visit the Healthpoint website.

This testing data does not include the number of tests processed by Waikato DHB, as systems remain down as a result of the cyber attack. The Waikato data continues to be recorded manually and monitored. The data will be added to the tally once systems have been restored.

The manual data shows Waikato has been processing around 300 tests a day over the last 7 days.The overall testing numbers have been updated today following a data cleaning process which has removed duplicates and deleted tests from the system.

The duplicates usually arose from repeats of samples that required retesting where samples were misplaced or damaged.

The clean-up has occurred as part of the process of moving to a more automated approach which provides greater ability to track and trace test samples through the laboratory processing system and to speed up reporting as part of a surge response.

As a result of the clean up 3,889 results have been removed from the overall testing tally which is now 2,339,666.

NZ COVID Tracer
NZ COVID Tracer now has 2,890,309 registered users.

Poster scans have reached 301,669,494 and users have created 11,739,170 manual diary entries.

There have been 717,351 scans in the last 24 hours to midday yesterday.

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