The peak of the southern Omicron outbreak is looming.
Yesterday Otago and Southland recorded 1220 cases of Covid-19, the third successive day where case numbers were in the 1200s.
"There are two peaks, the number of hospitalisations peak and the number of daily cases peak," Southern District Health Board acting quality and clinical governance solutions director Dr Hywel Lloyd said.
"My sense is that we may be a week off that [the daily cases peak] and we are probably a couple of weeks away from the hospital admission peak, which elsewhere has been about 10 days past the case peak."
Earlier this week University of Canterbury Covid-19 modeller Michael Plank said he expected the southern peak would bring about 1500 new cases a day.
Dr Lloyd, who is leading the SDHB’s Covid response planning, said while prediction was an inaccurate science, the SDHB was expecting case numbers to generally be in line with Prof Plank’s modelling.
Auckland, where the current outbreak first took hold, is now experiencing declining case numbers but a high number of hospital admissions, and the SDHB region had experienced the same trends a fortnight later, Dr Lloyd said.
"Our hospitalisation rates are among the lowest in the country and that’s probably due to the demographic nature of the outbreak so far [the majority of cases being in young people]."
In the South yesterday, 16 infected people were in hospital, including the first recorded admission to an intensive care unit, in Dunedin Hospital.
In total, 11 people were in Dunedin Hospital, four in Southland in Hospital and one in Lakes.
Southern hospitals have yet to make severe cuts to services due to Covid-related staff absences, but the board has warned in recent days its resources were coming under strain.
Dr Lloyd said the toughest time for hospital staff would likely be between the two anticipated peaks.
"The pool of staff we have is under pressure, even when we don’t have Covid, but with that added in we are struggling in certain areas."
Queenstown-Lakes surged past 2000 cases yesterday, 248 new positive tests adding to a total of 2069 people with Covid-19.
Dunedin lodged another 368 cases (3556 active cases), while 200 new cases diagnosed in Invercargill took its active cases number to 1385.
Nationally, 19,452 new cases were reported yesterday, and 971 people were in hospital, 21 of them in intensive care.
The Ministry of Health also recorded 24 Covid-19-related deaths, in Northland (3), Auckland (7), Waikato (7), Bay of Plenty (2), Mid Central (2) and Wairarapa (2).
