Three new cases of Covid-19

There are three new confirmed and probable cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand.

Ministry of Health director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield gave an update on Covid-19 this afternoon.

There have been 10 straight days where the number of new cases has been in single digits.

Today's new cases are made up of two confirmed cases and one probable case, Dr Bloomfield said.

Two are all linked to known cases, and one is under investigation. The total number of confirmed and probable cases is 1472, he said.

There are no additional deaths to report.

Thirty-four more people have recovered, meaning 82 per cent have now recovered. There are nine people in hospital, including one person in the ICU in Middlemore., he said.

The total number of tests is now 126,066 tests.

Elimination is an 'ongoing effort'

There are two recent cases of community transmission.

Bloomfield said more cases will continue to pop up under the elimination goal.

The Alert Level 4 lockdown had achieved what it set out to do, he said, but there were still ongoing cases of Covid-19 and overseas experience shows how quickly those numbers can rise again if "we take our foot off the pedal".

He said elimination was not a point in time, but a sustained effort "to keep it out and stamp it out".

Bloomfield said he had enjoyed a takeaway coffee today, but it important no to congregate outside cafes or in carparks of takeaway places.

"We do not want to see the sorts of rebounds we have seen in other countries."

That underlined the importance of maintaining physical distance, he said.

Bloomfield said elimination had been achieved in terms of what Alert Level 4 set out to achieve, but elimination was an "ongoing effort".

He referred to epidemiologist Sir David Skegg's definition of a small number of cases and an ability to stamp those out quickly.

There was only one case of community transmission since April 1, which Bloomfield said was still being investigated as being linked to an existing case.

"That does give us confidence that we've achieved our goal of elimination, which never meant zero (cases) but it does mean we know where our cases are coming from," Bloomfield said today.

But people had to be even more vigilant as the country moved into Alert Level 3, he added.

New Zealand is now the focus of headlines in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia.

The Daily Telegraph in the UK reported New Zealand being on the verge of a "brilliant victory" and Australia's mass-market news.com website said New Zealand had won a major battle. The New York Times and Washington Post have both featured articles on how New Zealand is combating the threat.