The long tail of the Omicron outbreak is lingering in Otago and Southland as case numbers continue a slow descent.
The Ministry of Health reported 746 new Covid-19 cases in the Southern District Health Board region yesterday.
There were 28 people in southern hospitals with Covid-19, one in intensive care.
University of Canterbury Covid-19 modeller Prof Michael Plank said in the South, as in other parts of the country, case numbers were coming down from a peak, "but we’re seeing a bit of a long tail".
"Cases are coming down slower than they went up," Prof Plank said.
Last month, case numbers consistently topped 1000 a day in the South.
Over Good Friday and Saturday case numbers averaged 874 a day before falling to 706 new cases on Sunday.
At the other end of the spectrum, in Auckland, where case numbers peaked in the middle of last month, cases dropped dramatically.
They fell from nearly 10,000 a day in early March, to a little more than 4500 a week later.
There were 453 new cases in New Zealand’s biggest city yesterday.
Southern case numbers were not expected to come down as quickly as Auckland’s, because Auckland peaked "quite a bit higher", Prof Plank said.
Because of the size of Auckland’s outbreak, where the virus burned through the population quickly, it abruptly became more difficult for the virus to find new people to infect, he said.
Here the virus spread differently.
If there were future waves of Omicron infections, Prof Plank was hopeful they would be smaller, but that was not guaranteed.
Whether Easter gatherings or holiday-making had any effect on new cases would not be clear until next week’s case numbers, he said.
But a relaxation of restrictions, or a change in people’s behaviour, could potentially bump up the size of any second wave that might hit over winter or spring.
When Omicron started taking off, a lot of people were cautious and had possibly restricted their own activities more than the Government required.
Although some people remained very cautious, overall a more relaxed approach was allowing the virus to find "new pockets of susceptible people" and that was potentially contributing to the outbreak’s long tail.
"I think we do have to expect that there will be further waves. Hopefully, they won’t be as big as the one we’ve just experienced — although if a new variant does come along, then all bets are off, really.
"We don’t really know what that will do until it arrives," he said.
The Health Ministry reported 6242 new community Covid-19 cases in New Zealand yesterday.
Eleven more people died with the disease, taking the total number of publicly reported deaths with Covid-19 to 597.
There were 553 people in New Zealand hospitals with Covid-19 yesterday, including 23 in intensive care.
The seven-day rolling average of case numbers continued to decline, with yesterday’s seven-day rolling average at 7986 — last Monday it was 10,169, the ministry said.
