There are 21 new cases of Covid-19 in the community today (Sunday August 22), bringing the total number of active cases to 72.

Director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield told a media briefing this afternoon that 61 of those cases were now confirmed as part of the Auckland cluster. The remainder are under investigation but initial assessment has found most cases show an obvious link to the cluster, he said.

Twenty of the new cases are in Auckland and one (which was first reported yesterday) in Wellington.

Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins also announced that QR scanning would become mandatory for most events and businesses.

“Ministers have also decided that record keeping such as scanning with the Covid-19 tracer app or signing in will become mandatory at most events and businesses at all alert levels,” he said.

It will become mandatory to make a record of where you have been in places where people have been consistently and in large numbers, he said, because the Delta variant of Covid-19 has shown that speed in contact tracing is key.

Places where records are already kept and people are already required to sign in won’t need to adjust what they are already doing.

“The obligation will be on the person responsible for the place or the gathering,” Chris said, calling it “an additional responsibility we are placing on them”.

There will be a seven day period of grace after a change in alert levels to allow business and event organisers to get this organised, he said.

Ashley said the number of contacts has increased significantly: 8,667 individual contacts have been formally identified, and this can be expected to increase.

Most are considered close contacts, he said.

More than 280 locations of interest have also been identified, and new locations of interest will be published every two hours. At this stage, there are no locations of interest in the South Island.

Chris said there was a new record of vaccination numbers yesterday, with more than 50,000 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine delivered on Saturday.

“One million New Zealanders are now fully vaccinated against Covid 19,” he said, and 73 per cent of New Zealanders over 40 years-of-age have now had at least one dose of the vaccine.

More doses of the Pfizer vaccine arrived in NZ yesterday, and the country has “excellent” stocks of personal protective equipment (PPE), Ashley said. 

There are also three positive cases to report in managed isolation.

PHOTO: RNZ