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COVID-19 reporting

Weekly updates of COVID-19 cases, hospital admissions, and deaths in New Zealand including counts and rates by demographic groups.

To view the COVID-19 reporting in a full screen, select the full screen mode icon (double diagonal arrow on the lower right side).

COVID-19 reporting changes

From 16 October 2025, we are making a number of improvements to our COVID-19 reporting.

This reflects our transition from pandemic reporting to a newly developed reporting system, which is consistent with other updated reporting measures and standards.

As such, there are some changes in the methodology used to present our COVID-19 reporting. These include:

  1. Death reporting changes

    We have made changes in how COVID-19 attributed deaths are reported. This sees all reported deaths after 18 July 2025 based on mortality collection data only, which is considered more robust than previous reporting methods, but has longer reporting times.

    It also means that from this date, we are no longer reporting ‘all deaths within 28 days’ of testing positive for COVID-19. This reporting method was developed during the pandemic to ensure more rapid tracking of COVID-19's impact, but more accurate and targeted forms of reporting are now available.

    As we have updated our reporting, as of 12 October, there are 659 deaths that were not previously attributed to COVID-19 that have now been added to the total number of COVID-19 attributed deaths. Most of these deaths occurred between February 2022 and 2023, and the updated numbers do not materially change the trends that were reported at the time.

  2. Admission rate reporting

    We are also improving how we report COVID-19 hospitalisation data. Data will now be available for all districts, whereas previously this was only available for a limited number of districts.

  3. Population denominator change

    For COVID-19 rate calculations, the population denominator is now changing from using 2021 HSU (Health System User) data, to the Stats NZ estimated resident population, which is considered the gold standard and is used for other Health NZ reporting. A monthly smoothing method is applied to population projections, whereby each year’s projected population is introduced gradually over a 12-month period.