There are 7927 new cases of Covid-19 in the community today.

The Ministry of Health released the latest case numbers in a statement at 1pm.

The Ministry of Health is also reporting a further 27 virus related deaths.

There are 393 people in hospital with Covid, including 12 in intensive care.

Of today's deaths, 22 people have died in the past five days and five have died since March 29.

One person was in their 40s, two in their 60s, seven in 70s, nine in their 80s and eight were aged over 90.

Today's reported deaths take the total number of publicly reported deaths with Covid-19 to 1,294.

The seven-day rolling average of reported deaths is 14.

The seven-day rolling average of community case numbers today is 6,059 – last Thursday, it was 6,937.

Today's cases are in Northland (165), Auckland (2,239), Waikato (558), Bay of Plenty (261), Lakes (96), Hawke's Bay (273), MidCentral (319), Whanganui (125), Taranaki (223), Tairāwhiti (45), Wairarapa (58), Capital and Coast (877), Hutt Valley (372), Nelson Marlborough (337), Canterbury (1,177), South Canterbury (132), Southern (594), West Coast (73), Unknown (3).

The ministry is also reporting 96 imported cases today.

There are now 42,398 active cases in the community.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been 1,215,822 cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand.

Yesterday, 54 first doses, 64 second doses, 29 third primary doses, 918 booster doses, 24 paediatric first doses and 180 paediatric second doses of the vaccine were administered.

The average age of those in hospital is 60.

In the last 24 hours, 4528 PCR tests and 15,095 rapid antigen tests were processed.

Covid-19 seems to be plateauing steadily but a senior health official says a more aggressive variant may be detected in New Zealand in the future.

Yesterday, there were 7050 new cases in the community and a further 24 Covid-related deaths were reported.

There were 361 people in hospital with the virus, including 14 people in intensive care.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health's chief science adviser Dr Ian Town has provided detail on surveillance measures used for monitoring new variants of Covid-19 in New Zealand.

Town says the international situation for Covid-19 is further waves of Omicron continue and "New Zealand has been experiencing exactly the same thing with additional sub-variants being detected here over recent weeks".

"Once we detect a variant here in New Zealand, it does take some time to gain an appreciation of the severity and the outcome for individual patients.

"There is a small chance that a more aggressive variant may be found in New Zealand [...] that's where our international intelligence plays an important part," Town said.

This comes as four cases of the Omicron subvariant BA.5 and one case of BA.4 were detected in the community with no clear link to the border last Friday.

Meanwhile, a health expert says offering a second vaccine booster to vulnerable groups is the right thing to do, but more work is needed to gain an adequate uptake of the first booster.

The government has revealed the groups that could be eligible for a further Covid-19 booster.

It's planning a law change that will allow those people to get the dose six months after their first booster without a prescription in July.

Sir Collin Tukuitonga, Auckland University associate professor of public health and the associate dean of the Pacific programme at the medical school, said offering a second booster was the correct move, but there were concerns about gaps in the vaccination programme to date.

"The immediate issue for us is that we still have not very adequate uptake of the first booster and in order to get the second booster you need to have had the first one," he told RNZ.

The bill will be rushed through Parliament and once it has passed, the director-general of health will confirm which groups are eligible.

The Government is proposing people aged 65 and over, Māori and Pacific people aged 50 and over, aged care residents and severely immunocompromised people be eligible.

That will amount to about 850,000 people.