Health officials have reported 5939 new cases of Covid-19. There are 634 cases in hospital, including 15 people in ICU.

New Zealand will remain at the Orange traffic light setting, while hospitalisations remain elevated and pressure on the health system continues through winter.

It comes as the current outbreak looks to come increasingly under control.

On Monday, 4006 new community cases of Covid-19 were reported.

There were 654 people in hospital with the virus, including 16 in intensive care. Health officials have reported a further 13 Covid-related deaths - including a child under the age of 10.

The seven-day rolling average of Covid community cases is now 5288, while last Monday it was 6990. The hospitalisation and death rates are currently tracking well below previous modelling high-risk scenarios.

Verrall will soon announce if the country will move out of the orange setting and any further decisions including around vaccination rollout and mask settings.

The Ministry of Health will also at 1pm publish the daily Covid-19 numbers.

The ministry says there have now been 1638 deaths confirmed as attributable to Covid-19, either as the underlying cause of death or as a contributing factor.

Although the latest outbreak had peaked, there were likely to be thousands of new Omicron cases every day for the foreseeable future, infectious diseases modeller Dr David Welch said.

Unlike the eradication of the earlier Covid-19 variants in 2020 and 2021, Omicron would stay in the community until it was superseded by a new strain, said Welch, a computer science senior lecturer at Auckland University.

That meant it would probably fall to around 3000 new cases a day until the next wave arrived, he said.

Covid-19 has been directly responsible for one in seven recent deaths – and has already claimed five times as many lives as those lost in car accidents last year.

A Herald analysis showed that, in the week ending July 17 – around the time this second Omicron wave was peaking – 836 people died across New Zealand.

Of those deaths, 120 - nearly 15 per cent - were directly attributed to Covid-19.

Nearly one in five died within 28 days of being reported as a Covid-19 case.

"For the first time, Covid-19 has probably become the leading cause of death in New Zealand," Otago University epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker said.

"Fifteen per cent of people dying from Covid-19 is about the same proportion of people who die from ischaemic heart disease, which is currently our single biggest killer.

"It's also twice the number dying from stroke, which has long been number two."

And as health experts have constantly warned throughout the pandemic, that burden hasn't been falling equally across society.

So far, Māori and Pacific people have accounted for more than a third of hospitalisations with Covid-19 – and nearly two in 10 deaths where the virus was the underlying cause.

Another clear risk factor in hospitalisation and deaths remained age.

All but 46 of those who'd died from the virus were older than 60 - and two-thirds of deaths were recorded among people older than 80.

Baker has already aired concerns that average life expectancy – a measure that New Zealand was only one of three countries to improve over the first two years of the pandemic – could fall significantly because of Covid-19.