There have been 9405 new Covid-19 cases reported across the country in the past week, covering the period from Monday, October 3 to Sunday, October 9, according to the Ministry of Health update.
As of midnight on Sunday, there were 134 people in hospitals with the virus – four of whom were in an intensive care or high dependency care unit.
The seven-day rolling average of new daily cases was 1598, up on the week prior when it was 1422.
As of Monday, Waitematā (north and west Auckland) had the highest number of new (1399) and active Covid-19 cases overall (1648). Counties Manukau (south and east Auckland) and Auckland central had the second and third highest number of new cases in the past week, respectively.
BA.5 continues to account for most sequenced cases, up to 75 percent of those seen between September 17-30, followed by BA.4.6 (15 percent of cases) and BA.2.75 (10 percent of cases), the Ministry stated.
The Omicron BQ.1.1 lineage has not yet been detected in New Zealand in the fortnight to September 30. However, as BQ.1.1 is “rising rapidly” in Europe at present, the Ministry said, “we might have a situation where we expected multiple new variants to be circulating, all with different immune evasion and severity profiles.”
