Age Concern chief executive Stephanie Clare said the Government had pledged support for people who were not ''digitally-enabled", but she did not yet know what that would entail.
The best thing the Government could do would be to support organisations like Age Concern, Citizens Advice and Rural Women to help the elderly because they had the right networks and in some cases were already providing IT classes.
The number of elderly people using the internet had jumped during the first lockdown, Clare said.
''A lot of the messages were 'go online for more information' so we noticed an increase in activity. There's a group of seniors coming through now who are much more savvy than we ever expected — but there's also a group who will never be online for a variety of reasons, including cost and complexity. It will be problematic but we're focusing on solutions as much as we can.''
She urged Northlanders to contact elderly neighbours who weren't technologically savvy, even just by dropping a message in the letterbox and offer to help.
''We have a collective responsibility here, and even more so for remote areas. There are pockets of New Zealand that are going to need help.''
Beryl Wilkinson, of Age Concern Whangārei, urged the elderly to make sure their primary healthcare provider knew how they wanted to be contacted.
Her GP, for example, knew she wanted phone calls or letters, not texts and emails.
She also urged older people, especially if they lived alone, to have a plan in case they needed to isolate themselves.
They also needed a backup plan in case that plan fell over — for example if the person who had agreed to drop off their groceries also had to isolate.
Laurence Zwimpfer, a director of Digital Inclusion Alliance Aotearoa, said a lot of work had gone into improving New Zealand's internet infrastructure in recent years.
The next big challenge was making sure everyone knew how to use it, so trusted local groups had to be resourced to teach those skills.
Cost was often cited as another barrier to internet access so his organisation, through the Spark Foundation, was providing low-cost internet to anyone living in a 4G area.
According to Census 2018 data, 80 per cent of Northland households have access to the internet — but that means 20 per cent do not.
Just over 90 per cent of Northland households have access to a mobile phone, while 1.5 per cent have no access to any form of telecommunication.
The figures for New Zealand overall are 86, 92 and 1 per cent respectively.
While Omicron appears to be less severe than earlier variants, it still poses a risk to older people and those with underlying health conditions.
Epidemiologist Michael Baker's advice to those groups was to get a booster, reduce contact with people outside the family unit and wear a high-quality mask.
Now was the time to scale back interactions with other people, he said.
''The bad news is this is a very intense outbreak and in some ways, it is also the good news in a sense as it means it will be over in a few months.''
He thought case numbers of about 50,000 a day could start in late February and peak in March.
Concerns have also been raised for several years about the elderly being shut out of financial systems as banks close branches in rural towns, scrap cheques and shift services online.
• Older people in need of assistance or advice can call Age Concern on 0800 652 105.
