Covid 19 Omicron outbreak: Surgeries cut back by CDHB as more staff catch virus

The Omicron variant has had a slow climb of nearly a month in New Zealand to get to 1000 cases a day. Photo / Getty Images

The Canterbury District Health Board has been forced to cancel a number of operations due to the rising number of Covid-19 cases affecting staff.

The only operations still going ahead are for urgent surgery involving cancer care, accidents or major trauma surgery, and a small number of elective planned procedures.

Canterbury's COVID-19 Emergency Coordination Centre Controller, Dr Helen Skinner said
with the number of active cases of Omicron continuing to rise in our community, more Canterbury DHB staff are contracting COVID-19 and having to isolate.

"Some outpatient appointments are also being postponed this week. Many have already been switched to virtual consults and are carried out over the phone or by video call, however we have to postpone more planned in-person appointments this week," Skinner said.

There are 17,244 active Covid-19 cases. Photo / Supplied

There were 1887 new cases in Canterbury over the last 24 hours.

Covid-19 case numbers should peak and then level off in the south of the country next week, a Covid-19 modeller says.

University of Canterbury mathematics and statistics professor Michael Plank said the number of cases would not disappear, but they would soon be lower in the Southern District Health Board region.

"We'll see a peak in case numbers, but hospitalisations may continue because there's a lag time.

Plank said the number of cases depended on how many people were tested.

The Ministry of Health yesterday reported 14,494 new community cases in New Zealand, including eight deaths. There were 703 cases in the SDHB area.

The ministry said there were 896 people in hospital with the virus in New Zealand yesterday, including 15 people in the South.

Six of the eight Covid-related deaths were in Auckland, one in Waikato and one in Lakes. Two of those who died were men and six were women. Three were aged in their 60s, one in their 70s, one in their 80s and three in their 90s.

The total number of publicly reported Covid-19 related deaths in New Zealand had now reached 113, it said.

The ministry confirmed there was a continued drop in overall case numbers nationally.

For four days last week case numbers were reported at more than 20,000.

However, the reduction to 18,699 new cases on Saturday and now 14,494 yesterday was hastened by falling numbers in Auckland, it said.

Case numbers in New Zealand's biggest city fell steadily over last week from nearly 10,000 reported on March 8 to a little more than 4500 yesterday, the ministry said.

However, the ministry pointed to a seven-day rolling average of cases at 19,771, which was only slightly down from Saturday.

The ministry thanked people who were reporting their Rapid Antigen Test (Rat) results — both positive and negative.

Yesterday, 33,286 test results were reported, of which 14,047 were positive.

Over the past week, 13.4million Rats had been distributed, the ministry said.

Over the past 24 hours there had been 3186 PCR tests, and the PCR tests rolling seven-day average to Saturday was 4375.