From today’s Ministry of Health update:
83 new cases of Covid-19 (78 confirmed, 5 probable), total now 451
Summary
| Total to date | New in last 24 hours | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of confirmed cases in New Zealand | 416 | 78 |
| Number of probable cases | 35 | 5 |
| Number of confirmed and probable cases | 451 | 13 |
| Number of cases in hospital | 12 (22 total to date) | – |
| Number of recovered cases | 50 | 13 |
View full details of the confirmed cases.
View details of significant COVID-19 clusters.
Health officials expect to see an increase in covid-19 cases in the coming days, despite today’s number of cases being lower than yesterday’s.
50 individuals have recovered
12 people are in hospital:
- 3 in Wellington Regional Hospital
- 2 in Nelson Hospital
- 2 in Whangarei Hospital
- 1 each in Auckland, Waikato, Taranaki, Dunedin and Greymouth hospitals.
Average daily test number over a 7 day period is 1613
8 Air NZ staff are infected with Covid-19. Al worked on long haul from London or New York.
Government Controller John Ombler:
No one needs to worry about supermarkets running out of food, choose one person to do the shopping and respect the need for physical distancing
Can only leave house for physical exercise or essential reasons – stick to your bubble
Avoid undertaking activities that are a distance from home
Don’t travel out of your neighbourhood and go to baches or second homes – stay in one place
Police report most people are following the new rules, isolated incidents of people congregating – in these cases people were spoken to
If people believe others are not complying with new restrictions first port of call is to discuss it with them, otherwise you might like to call police on 105
Maritime New Zealand says the strong message during the lockdown, is that all recreational boating and other non-essential on-water activity must stop.
Your NZ 
David
/ 28th March 2020Close the border. Stop all flights. You had enough warning to get home, weeks and weeks and weeks.
Ray
/ 28th March 2020The jackboots are being tried on for size.
First we are told the Commissioner of Police rather than the Prime Minister’s thoughts on travel are the ones we should take notice of. Anything else is “ignorance” according to Inspector Gaskin who is charge of Mid Canterbury.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/news/120585429/coronavirus-timaru-police-stop-many-ignorant-people-on-first-day-of-lockdown
Then anything other than daily newspapers are banned.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/business/28-03-2020/magazines-and-community-papers-arent-an-essential-service-leaving-some-small-towns-and-elderly-without-news/
Duker
/ 28th March 2020The PM cant direct the Police Commissioner, its his total discretion on how and what.
As for non daily publications, its only applied to PRINTED ones.
Online can continue
Do you really think TV Guide is essential to the public or Womens Weekly ?
Bridges and Bennett will be shattered as they have cosy arrangements to get exclusive photo shoots
Kitty Catkin
/ 28th March 2020They may not be essential, but with no outside entertainment and no libraries, they will be missed. I will miss The Listener which arrives in the letterbox every week.
This is a petty and pointless infringement of civil liberty. I can just about understand the papers….but this ??? Come on, Jacinda. People want something to read. How meanspirited can you be ?
Kitty Catkin
/ 28th March 2020It’s a morale thing. People need something to take their minds off being under what is really house arrest.
The internet is overcrowded now; this can only make it even worse/
David
/ 28th March 2020https://www.dailywire.com/news/british-pathologist-heres-why-covid-19s-death-rate-may-be-lower-than-we-feared
Some perspective on the death rate, the way deaths are recorded etc.
Duker
/ 28th March 2020yes the US have better data on flu as they test for it in hospitals, another 1000 died from this for this week in US . Its now officially an epidemic
“7.4% of the deaths occurring during the week ending March 7, 2020 (week 11) were due to P&I. This percentage is above the epidemic threshold of 7.3% for week 11.- CDC
Pink David
/ 28th March 2020Flatten the curve! We should be going into total lockdown every year.
Kitty Catkin
/ 28th March 2020Why bother to come out at all ? That would eliminate road deaths, all viruses, work accidents, drownings…..
Kitty Catkin
/ 28th March 2020Shush, green David; we don’t want commonsense breaking out.
Gezza
/ 28th March 2020Just got home from my first post-lockdown grocery shop at the local New World in Tawa as my home food stocks are low. In a raincoat & wooly hat. It’s a shitty, wet day with a cold, Southerly wind blowing. First time I’ve had to queue there.
The woman behind me left her dog in the car, some kind of large terrier, he was singing to us, she said. She said she’d come out earlier in the morning but the queue was much longer, right around the side of the building and back out onto the Main Road, so she’d returned about 2pm, when our queue was much shorter.
They were letting us in four shoppers at a time. A young couple together were counted as one. Had to wait about half an hour to get inside, but even spaced out 2m apart most of us were able to chat amicably about the situation while we waited. People in the queue were all good-humoured & patient, but cold! A few of them said they’d come to shop today hoping that because the weather was so awful the queues would be shorter.
The only thing on my list the supermarket didn’t have was cans of Watties Spaghetti & Sausages. Had to get plain old spaghetti in tomato sauce. Otherwise the Supermarket seemed well stocked with meat, fresh vegies. But I didn’t visit all the aisles. Sugar & flour were sold out last Tuesday. I forgot to look. I need sugar.
All the long frozen food freezer compartments were well-stocked & chiller cabinets with the full usual range of chilled & frozen goods, from what I could see.
There were fewer staff than normal on the counters, but others were engaged in spraying disinfectant & wiping down those of the counters that were in use, & spraying & wiping down all the trolleys & their handles as people brought them back, then moving them them into place for incoming shoppers.
I was going to use the self-service checkout but a checkout operator was free so I accepted her invitation to use her checkout. The staff were all wearing latex gloves. Very few people in the queue or shopping were wearing surgical masks. None of the staff were.
The local dairies were open. I got some spag & saus at one of them, following the one in, one out rule. The Indian lady at the counter said business was very slow because the surrounding shops & eateries in the village were all shut, so there were fewer people popping in for small items, fags or treats, like on a normal day.
There was very little traffic on the road or in the streets.
Kitty Catkin
/ 28th March 2020I have only been in one queue, and everyone was goodnatured. The only complaints were facetious ones.
Someone who’s been in three times for flour is getting very annoyed. I don’t use sugar so didn’t look, but it was really annoying to discover empty shelves that made my visit a waste of time.
Duker
/ 28th March 2020“A man in his 70s with coronavirus in Nelson Hospital remains in a critical condition as New Zealand’s total number of confirmed cases nears 500…
He had underlying health conditions and had been in hospital for a number of days before his condition worsened.
The man is the first person with the virus in New Zealand to need intensive care support.” Stuff
Same as a flu ‘epidemic’ . The elderly , and those with existing health conditions will always be worst affected, even falling off the steps at the back porch.
Wait for the news media to go into meltdown when its the ‘first millennial’ in ICU
david in aus
/ 28th March 2020I was in Melbourne today, shops are still open but with social distancing evident in shops. I went to a suburban strip mall, 1/3 of people were wearing face masks. All shop owners were wearing face masks.
Australia has similar rates of infection compared to NZ but the government has a different approach. NZ has a simple message: stay home, but I prefer the Australian approach.
We will see in hindsight which approach was a better balance of risk and benefits to society.
Remember, we can have zero road deaths by banning automobiles and roads. But is it the right decision?
Duker
/ 28th March 2020NZs confirmed 416 compared to Australias confirmed 3378
https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/coronavirus-covid-19-current-situation-and-case-numbers
so we are at 8% of Australia confirmed cases yet our population is 19% of Australias 26 mill
Remember confirmed cases are really people who were infected say a week ago ,( before restrictions came into effect) and Australia ramped up testing and more freely than NZ
I dont have number of tests done , which may show this
Duker
/ 28th March 2020Another thing to consider , NZs confirmed infections are still skewed by those who caught the disease before coming back here
as shown here a lot of people have a flight number connected to them
https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-current-situation/covid-19-current-cases/covid-19-current-cases-details
Conspiratoor
/ 28th March 2020‘Confirmed’ is an outcome of testing. Given the variability in who and how many are being tested, a more reliable indicator surely must be the death rate. Only 10 in Australia without suffocating the economy.
Yes, when the dust is settled on this we will know who made the right call
Pete George
/ 28th March 2020https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/coronavirus-covid-19-current-situation-and-case-numbers
And with a lot more confirmed cases presumably there’s a lot more chance of more deaths in Australia.
Conspiratoor
/ 28th March 2020How many unconfirmed cases are unconfirmed simply because they haven’t been tested and confirmed? In my view the only reliable statistic is the death rate caused by C19, and even that is open to interpretation
Alan Wilkinson
/ 28th March 2020Yes, there is a heap of missing data, a heap of unqualified data and a bunch of heroic pronouncements from modelers based on this shifting sand.
Chinese statistics are vulnerable to government manipulation. Other more trustworthy countries show wide variations not yet explicable and mostly less advanced.
Pink David
/ 28th March 2020Japan currently has very little restriction, and very few issues. NZ’ers have surrendered their civil liberties and freedoms on a scale never seen before, there better be a commission of inquiry into this regardless of the outcome.
Duker
/ 28th March 2020Yes Japan has only done 25,000 tests…Australia has done 196’000
Guess which country is pretty much proceeding as normal?
Well normal for Japan is bowing instead of hand shaking , more hand washing and common use of face masks
Kitty Catkin
/ 28th March 2020David in Aus; ours isn’t a message, it’s an order.
The social cost as well as the economic one will be appalling, but that doesn’t change anything. The PM has to be seen to be doing something. She’s telling the 4,999,500 of us who don’t have it to act as if we had. repeating it like a mantra. The scaremongering is as rife as it is irresponsible.
Blazer
/ 28th March 2020Queensland has a half arsed lockdown as well.
Will certainly be interesting to see the comparable results to..NZ.
David
/ 28th March 2020Or look at Sweden which is operating almost normally
Alan Wilkinson
/ 28th March 2020Iceland finds that half of those infected have no symptoms.
https://futurism.com/neoscope/half-coronavirus-carriers-no-symptoms
Alan Wilkinson
/ 28th March 2020That is how untested medical staff spread infections to sick people.
Duker
/ 28th March 2020About the same ratio on Diamond Princess cruise ship
Curious as to wether they have pre existing anti bodies or they avoided the contact or didn’t touch face etc