A Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand spokesperson says that before 2023, Covid-19 or Covid-related hospitalisations were given a variety of primary diagnosis codes that didn’t necessarily fall under these codes.

The spokesperson says the dramatic drop in respiratory infections could be attributed to the the lockdown periods when people were not moving around and interacting with others or travelling abroad, which had limited the spread of respiratory illnesses.

Discharge numbers have since begun returning to normal levels.

The data for 2023 is expected to become available in the next three to six months, and it's anticipated that hospital discharges for respiratory infections would return to pre-Covid levels.

As of Monday, 2,574,813 cases of Covid-19 have been officially reported since the virus first entered the country in 2020.

But as epidemiologist Michael Baker pointed out a few weeks ago, Kiwis aren’t reporting infections as readily now that the self-isolation requirements have stopped — which means it's impossible to know the true number of infections.

At midnight on Sunday, there were 258 people in hospital with Covid-19, with a rolling average of 43 admissions a day.

In the past week, an average of three Kiwis died of Covid-19 each day.

A total of 3768 deaths have been attributed to the virus since the start of the pandemic.