Introduction

This dashboard displays COVID-19 case, hospital admission and mortality trends for Aotearoa New Zealand. Please note that the dashboard relies on data that may be incomplete or subject to change.

These data are useful for examining trends over time overall and by population subgroups. All trends should be interpreted with caution, as there are multiple factors influencing trends, such as level of vaccination, which are not taken into account. It is not appropriate to use the data shown in this dashboard to compare risk of hospitalisation or death between different population subgroups. Subgroups may have different age structures (for example the Māori and Pacific population groups are on average younger than European New Zealanders) and age is a major determinant of both hospitalisation and death risk.

Cases

Data on community cases are sourced from a combination of the National Contact Tracing Service (NCTS) and EpiSurv (New Zealand’s public health surveillance platform) databases.

Since 24 February 2022, most testing has been through self-administered rapid antigen tests (RATs) which require self-reporting of results. Therefore, it is likely that many infections are not detected or reported, and the proportion of infections reported (‘reported cases’) may differ by age, ethnicity, deprivation or other demographic factors. The proportion of infections being reported (case ascertainment) has declined from peak ascertainment in March 2022.

Hospital admissions

The Ministry reports COVID-19 hospitalisations using two datasets:

  1. the Inpatient Admission (IP) dataset
  2. the National Minimum Dataset (NMDS)

Of the two databases, IP is a more up-to-date source of admission data but only includes data from hospitals in the following districts:

  • Northland
  • Auckland
  • Waitematā
  • Counties Manukau
  • Waikato
  • Capital and Coast/Hutt
  • Nelson Marlborough
  • Canterbury/West Coast
  • Southern

The NMDS provides more accurate and comprehensive data that covers the whole country, but this data is only available after a significant time lag, usually about 60 days.

Only admissions that occur in the districts listed above are included in the dashboard.

This approach is used for this dashboard to avoid the misleading appearance of decreasing hospitalisation rates for the most recent months in which only the IP data is reliably available.

Over time the hospitalisation data may change as NMDS data becomes available.

Hospitalisation data that covers all of NZ is available at:

https://github.com/minhealthnz/nz-covid-data

but note the proviso above that the most recent two month’s data will not be complete.

Definition of hospital admission

Hospital admission data used in this dashboard relates to hospitalisation “for” COVID-19.

For the IP data, the health specialty associated with the hospitalisation is used to determine if the hospital stay may be related to COVID-19; this method rules out hospitalisations that are highly unlikely to be related to COVID-19.

As NMDS data becomes available, the clinical codes that retrospectively evaluate the reasons for the hospital stay are used to gauge if the stay was related to COVID-19. The NMDS data is a more robust source for identifying potential hospitalisations ‘for’ COVID-19.

Deaths

COVID-19 deaths are defined as people who died with the cause of death being attributable to COVID-19 (that is, an underlying or contributory cause). Recent trends should be interpreted with caution to account for death coding delays.

Wastewater and Whole Genome Sequencing

Please see the ESR Wastewater dashboard for wastewater information.

Please see the latest ESR Genomics Insights report for variant information.