With a roll of about 600, the absences were noticeable as some classes only had nine pupils.
The level of absence has not been observed in “quite a long time”, leading the school to send a message to parents.
“It did prompt us to just tell parents, ‘hey look, you know, there’s a wave coming through and just to keep an eye on kids and influenza A is quite contagious, so if there are any illnesses, just please keep your children at home’,” Lethbridge said.
About 100 students and some staff were off sick today.
Some staff have been off sick for a week, Lethbridge said.
“It’s very important for kids to be at school. However, it’s not good to have sick kids at school.”
Hato Hone St John director of ambulance operations Doug Gallagher yesterday said “sustained heavy demand” on the emergency ambulance service would impact patients and the public.
On Saturday, 2562 calls for an ambulance went through 111 – the highest number received in a single day. A normal day was about 1900 calls.
Gallagher said it was the third time the daily record had been broken this week, with 2404 calls on Monday and 2454 on Thursday.
Gallagher said winter illnesses were driving demand for service.
“It’s interesting … it’s been a relatively mild winter up until about a week or a week and a half ago, and that’s where we started to see the sudden spike in demand for our services,” he said.
“I would expect that that’s related to the weather snap that we’ve had within the last couple of weeks.”