The Director-General of Health has declared the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in New Zealand behind us.
Dr Ashley Bloomfield made the assurance from the Beehive on Tuesday afternoon, during a press conference in which he also revealed 17 more cases and four more deaths from coronavirus in the last day.
It comes after an eight-day period in which the number of active cases across the country dipped for the first time, as those who were diagnosed with the disease recovered at a faster rate than new cases cropped up.
Of the 1366 people to have been infected with COVID-19 in New Zealand, 628 have recovered - just shy of half, after an increase of 82 on Monday - and Dr Bloomfield expects that pattern to continue.
"Yes, we are past the peak - that seems to be clear now," he said. "The key information we're looking for now is for each of those new cases, we want to know very quickly where they have come from.
"We will be more confident once we know about each of those new cases that have been appearing from the last week and as we go into this week.
"If we continue to get reasonable testing rates of people with any symptoms, and we're still not finding additional cases, that will provide us with an even greater level of assurance."
Dr Bloomfield says the public health plan is to drastically reduce the number of active cases - but is adamant the real measure of success is whether new cases are emerging without a link to another person with the virus.
"If we can't immediately link [new cases] to an extant case or cluster, we need to do a pretty forensic analysis and figure out where they've come from," he said.
"We need to have a very quick and close look at all the possible contacts there and put a ring-fence around it.
"[We want to] get down to not just a low number of cases, but [confidence] that through our testing we're not identifying further cases that seem to be popping up out of nowhere, rather than being linked to existing cases - that's what we're really looking for."
Despite the drop in total active coronavirus cases, the death toll from the disease has now risen to nine in New Zealand. Four of those deaths occurred in the last 24 hours.
There are also 15 people in hospital, three of which are in ICU. One is in a critical condition.
