Ministry of Health Covid-19 update
August 10, 2020
There are no new cases of Covid-19 to report in New Zealand today.
It has been 101 days since the last case of Covid-19 was acquired locally from an unknown source.
Two additional cases are reported as having recovered, so there are now 21 active cases of Covid-19 in managed isolation facilities.
New Zealand’s total number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 remains at 1219.
There is no one currently requiring hospital-level care for Covid-19.
Yesterday our laboratories processed 2125 tests, bringing the total number of tests completed to date to 496,606. There were 1134 swabs taken in managed isolation and quarantine facilities yesterday.
Testing
The number of tests yesterday was encouraging for a Sunday.
We’ve now passed 100 days without community transmission, but testing remains one of the best ways to ensure there’s no undetected community transmission in New Zealand. We need everyone to play their part in that.
While Covid-19 continues around the world, New Zealand cannot be complacent.
Our response to Covid-19 works on the basis that we should be prepared for a case of community transmission, and that that could happen at any time.
We have prepared for this eventuality by, among other things, scaling up our capacity in testing and contact tracing, and every New Zealander needs to be prepared for the virus to re-emerge.
Tracing contacts of cases of Covid-19 as quickly as possible would help stop the virus from spreading in our communities.
We can’t afford for people to wait until there is a case of community transmission to start using the app – we need to quickly be able to isolate any contacts of a future case in our community before the virus spreads out of control.
That means now is the time to download and start using the NZ Covid Tracer app, if you haven’t already downloaded it.
NZ Covid Tacer App
NZ Covid Tracer has now recorded more than 646,400 registered users.
There have been 86,927 posters created, and 27,968 poster scans. There have been 16,151 manual entries recorded in the app.
Masks
We are continuing to recommend households add masks to their earthquake emergency kits, as part of New Zealand’s ongoing response to Covid-19.
We know there has been concern around supply issues, but we urge people to take the same approach as shopping for groceries during Alert Level 4 – shop normally and there will sufficient masks for everyone.
