Friday January 21

A Covid-19 case in Palmerston North, initially reported yesterday, has been confirmed as being the Omicron variant and there is one new possible Omicron case in Auckland.

The person works at Auckland Airport and they are not linked to previously reported Omicron cases.

There are 23 new community cases of Covid-19 today.

Of these new cases, 11 are in Auckland, 1 in Waikato, 8 in the Lakes District, 1 in Nelson Marlborough and 2 in Hawke's Bay.

There are 9 new cases to report in the Nelson Tasman region. All of the cases live in the same household.

8 of these cases were notified after the Ministry’s reporting deadline and will be added to the official tally tomorrow.

There are three new cases in Hawke’s Bay, one of which will be officially added to tomorrow’s case numbers.

There are 18 people in hospital, with 1 of those people in intensive care or high dependency units.

The average age of people currently in hospital is 55.

95 percent of New Zealand's eligible population have had the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, and 93 percent have had a second dose.

There have been 4,859,378 vaccine pass downloads, including 28,240 in the last 24 hours.

Click here for a list of updated locations of interest.

A list of Palmerston North locations of interest can be found here.

Top image: Woman wearing a protective mask on a bus. Photo: Stock photo/Getty Images

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