There have been 11,634 new community cases of Covid-19 reported today, with 13 further deaths and 639 people in hospital.

The number of hospitlisations has dropped from 654 yesterday, but the number of people of people in intensive care has grown by six to 29 today.

Today's seven-day average of new community cases is 11,791, down from 14,515 last week.

Three of today's 13 new deaths were people in the 30s, the Ministry of Health has confirmed.

The others include two in their 50s, two in their 60s, four in their 70s, one in their 80s, and one over 90. Seven were women and six were men.

Three people were from Northland, one from Auckland, two from Waikato, one from Bay of Plenty, one from Whanganui, two from West Coast, and three from Southern.

The deaths being reported today include people who have died over the past 10 days. The death toll of people with Covid-19 in New Zealand is now 456.

There were also 43 new cases reported at the border today.

Yesterday 15 further deaths, 654 people in hospital and 12,575 new community cases were reported.

There have now been 728,764 cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand.

A University of Auckland epidemiologist wants pharmacies to do rapid antigen tests to improve the accuracy and better capture the results.

There are reports of people who have the virus recording negative RAT results, and Rod Jackson said home testing could miss up to half of positive Covid-19 cases.

A leaked memo from from the Northern Region Health Co-ordination Centre has raised questions over the daily reported case numbers, due to low reporting of RAT results.

The memo from March states: "The MoH shared the following with us this week: in the last month we have distributed 50 million RATs into the system and so far less than 1 million results have been reported."

Republished by agreement