‘Promising’ signs Covid-19 not lingering

‘‘Promising’’ signs are emerging as officials contemplate what Covid-19 alert level 1 will look like, after the country recorded a fourth-straight day yesterday without a new coronavirus case.

New Zealand’s total probable and confirmed case count remains at 1503, with 6113 tests carried out on Wednesday.

The last recorded death was on May 6, leaving the nation’s death toll at 21, with director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield saying it was his ‘‘great hope’’ it will be the last.

Just one person was receiving hospital-level care due to the virus, however the Middlemore Hospital patient was not in intensive care.

Bloomfield said he was feeling ‘‘very encouraged as we all should’’.

‘‘I think we are in a good position to provide advice to Cabinet to make a decision next Monday about the possibility of increasing the numbers in groups.

‘‘Of course, the key thing here is that because as, again, we’ve had quite high numbers of tests being done of both symptomatic and asymptomatic people, we’re just increasingly confident that there aren’t pockets out there.

‘‘That really then allows us to start thinking really seriously about what would a move to alert level 1 look like,’’ Bloomfield said.

The intention was to review the mass gathering restrictions after two weeks. ‘‘And I think you’ll be able to infer from the numbers, that everything remains promising . . . I think all of the indications are positive,’’ he added.

Authorities were ‘‘increasingly confident’’ the chain of transmission has been broken.

The uptake for the Ministry of Health’s contact tracing app has been good, with more than 236,000 people downloading it since it became available on Tuesday.

Around 6500 businesses have the QR codes in place, with

Bloomfield describing this as a good result.

The app asks for ethnicity details, something Bloomfield said was important to be able to paint a picture with the data.

On bars and pubs reopening, Bloomfield said hospitality businesses needed to ensure physical distancing was practised.

They were among the last group of businesses to resume trading, as the Government considered them to pose the biggest risk in spreading the virus.

Bloomfield said testing will be carried out in two distinct groups, the first would be symptomatic people in level 1 and 2.

There will also be targeted surveillance testing of people with high risk groups like border control workers and airline crew.

The case definition for testing was under review, with the aim of testing several thousand people a day, Bloomfield said.

At the moment, ‘‘a detailed plan’’ was being developed on surveillance testing, with more details likely to be made public next week.