There are 4540 new community cases of Covid and 473 hospitalisations.

There are 10 people in ICU and 16 new Covid-related deaths.

It comes as there were 4489 new community cases and 496 hospitalisations reported yesterday.

Dr Andrew Old, deputy director general of the Ministry of Health, said broadly Covid community case numbers are trending downwards.

The next question was "how low will we go" in terms of daily cases, he said.

"Pleasingly the case numbers in over 65s ... has also dropped for the fourth week running."

Case numbers in health workers had also declined for the fifth week running while wastewater detections had also dropped.

Hospitalisation numbers had also dropped in the past week, after weeks of hospital numbers remaining stubbornly high, Old said.

He said hospitalisation numbers tended to lag behind case numbers and so a reduction in hospitalisations indicated the transmission of Covid was falling.

Old was also hopeful New Zealand had passed its peak death rate, although it was too early to say for sure.

There are now 1782 deaths health officials are attributing to Covid.

In the past seven days, there has been an average of 12 deaths confirmed each day as attributable to the virus.

Old said because New Zealand had a low number of cases at the beginning of the outbreak, deaths in this country remained low compared to those elsewhere.

As an example, if New Zealand had suffered a death per million people rate similar to the United Kingdom, it would've equated to 13,000 deaths here.

If New Zealand had the same rate of death as the US it would've led to 15,000 deaths here.

Dr Pete Watson, interim national medical director at Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand said the nation's health system still faced a major challenge this winter.

However, it was encouraging to see Covid case numbers falling.

That together with falling cases of influenza and other winter illnesses led Watson to hope some of the pressures on hospitals across the country would soon ease.