New Zealand is moving to phase three of the Government's Omicron response plan at 11:59pm Thursday night.
Under phase three, only confirmed cases and their household contacts (the people they live with) will be required to isolate. All other contacts are asked to monitor for symptoms, but they do not need to isolate.
“From midnight tonight, close contacts will no longer be required to self-isolate and only confirmed cases and household contacts of a confirmed case will be required to do so. Confirmed cases and household contacts should isolate for 10 days but can now self-release after day 10, providing any testing requirements are met. If they develop symptoms, they are encouraged to test sooner," said Chris Hipkins, Covid-19 Response Minister.
“These changes will ease some of the pressure on our testing and contact tracing services over the next three to six weeks, while helping to ensure critical services and supply chains remain operational and our economy keeps moving."
If you've been exposed to a positive case and they are not a household contact, you can now make a [testing] judgment based on the level of contact you've had with them, he said.
Contact tracing teams will now focus on high risk locations such as hospital and aged care facilities.
"It's not the time to visit older relatives in residential care if you are a contact," said Ashley Bloomfield, Director General of Health.
The number of hospitalisations per day will replace daily case numbers as the most important metric.
There are 6,145 new cases in the community Thursday with 203 people in hospital.
Phase three is the least intensive phase of the response designed to respond to thousands of new cases of Omicron in the community each day, as has been the case this week with numbers rising sharply.
Community testing stations have been under pressure this week and have been using a mixture of PCR and RAT tests.
RATs will now be the primary testing means, with millions more arriving from overseas over the next few days, and will be available from hundreds of sites including pharmacies and GPs.
They are expected to be available for purchase through retail outlets from March.
Positive RAT tests will now be considered a case without the need for a confirming PCR test, and people are asked to upload them to their My Covid Record for inclusion in the daily total. Some 1,000 were uploaded Thursday.
As part of the self-management emphasis, new tools are being rolled out to allow positive cases to self notify their close contacts.
Over a third of those infected with Omicron will not have symptoms and Bloomfield urged Kiwis to "act as if you might have Covid."
“There’s no doubt the next few weeks are going to be tough, but New Zealand is better-positioned than most countries to respond to Omicron. What we’re seeing is what we expected. We just need to stick to our plan as we manage higher numbers of cases in coming weeks before we reach our peak," said Hipkins.
For specific details of the three phases of the Omicron response plan, click on the magnifying glass to zoom in on the image below, or see the table in a PDF format here.
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