Winter may bring more Covid cases
New Zealand needs to stamp out coronavirus before winter, director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield says.
Yesterday, he said the country had a total of 1106 Covid-19 cases – an increase of 67 from Sunday.
When asked how the onset of winter in New Zealand might affect the virus, Bloomfield said he initially believed there had been no evidence about seasonality.
However, yesterday, he was sent an ‘‘interesting paper’’ looking at the northern hemisphere experience.
It appeared that countries between the latitude of 30 and 50 degrees north was where the virus spread most, he said.
Translating that to the south, it was ‘‘pretty firmly where New Zealand is,’’ he said.
‘‘So we would expect, as we do with other respiratory illnesses, to see more of them happening in winter. And that is why we want to get down to as low a level and keep it at as low a level as possible. In fact, to stamp it out is our aim.’’
He said there were 39 new confirmed cases and 28 probable cases yesterday.
There were no additional deaths and 176 cases had recovered, he said.
About 43 per cent of total cases had a strong link to overseas travel, 38 per cent had links to confirmed cases within New Zealand and there was 2 per cent community transmission.
The rest are under investigation, he said.
The fact there was a big increase in testing without a big increase in case numbers gave some reassurance about the risk of community transmission, he said.
He was making no predictions about when the Government might be able to make a decision about moving between alert levels. We can be ‘‘encouraged’’ by the lack of dramatic increase in numbers, he said.