The seven-day rolling average increase in total deaths attributable to Covid is now 10.
Of the 10 people whose deaths being reported today, three were from Auckland region, one was from Waikato, one was from Taranaki, one was from MidCentral, one was from Wellington region, two were from Canterbury, and one was from the Southern region.
One was in their 40s, two were in their 60s, three were in their 70s, three were in their 80s and one was aged over 90. Of these people, three were women and seven were men.
Those in hospital included 43 cases of people who are unvaccinated or not eligible and three cases of people who have had one dose.
It also included 63 cases of people who are double vaccinated and 268 cases of people who have had at least one booster shot.
There are 26,786 active community cases, identified as people who've had Covid in the last seven days and are not yet classified as recovered.
New Zealand has now had 1,697,709 confirmed cases since the pandemic began.
Yesterday there were 3805 new cases of Covid-19 and 466 people in hospital with the virus, along with a further 16 Covid-related deaths
Eight people were reported to be in intensive care.
In the past seven days, there has been an average of 11 deaths confirmed each day as being attributable to the virus.
There have been a total of 1815 deaths confirmed as attributable to Covid-19 to date (either as the underlying cause of death or as a contributing factor).
New wastewater results from ESR have revealed Omicron BA.5 is now by far the most dominant Covid strain across New Zealand.
The research from the Institute of Environmental Science and Research shows BA.5, which was first identified in travellers in late April 2022, is now at 91 per cent and has overtaken the previous Omicron variant BA.2.
According to the ESR data, BA.2 now only represents three per cent of cases.
The seven-day rolling average of cases is 3876; last Friday it was 4581.
For hospitalisations, the rolling average is 515, while last Friday it was 609.
The findings also showed BA.2.75 and BA.4.6 are still very rare in New Zealand at the moment.
The results are part of the most recent Covid-19 genomics report released by the ESR in conjunction with Massey University, the University of Auckland and the University of Otago.
In the two weeks from July 30 to August 12, the ESR analysed the genome from 1394 cases.
There have been 18,000 cases tested this year.
In a post on Twitter, ESR genetics expert Professor Michael Bunce described the community genomes data as "a solid surveillance net for Aotearoa".
This month, New Zealand has seen the number of people hospitalised from Covid-19 on a slow and steady decline.
This time last month there were 797 people in hospital with Covid-19. This number crept up to 836 on July 25 before making a steady decline.
