hospitals<\/a> in that region, such as Palmerston North, have had patients report waiting more than 17 hours to be seen in ED.<\/p>\nHealth New Zealand is asking people attending the hospital in Hawke’s Bay to bring just one support person with them, as winter illnesses continue to place pressure on health services.<\/p>\n
Hawke’s Bay hospital and specialist services operations group director David Warrington said fewer people in waiting areas protected vulnerable patients and reduced the spread of infection.<\/p>\n
Zero to four year olds, followed by people aged 65-plus are the two groups with the highest number of hospitalisations, while babies and toddlers were also the most common age group admitted to ICU in 2026 with respiratory illness.<\/p>\n
Subclade K strain evolves from other influenza AH3 viruses<\/p>\n
The data showed that a variety of Influenza A (H3N2) was the most prevalent in the community.<\/p>\n
Cooper said that was also known as the “Subclade K strain” which caused a bad outbreak in Europe earlier this year.<\/p>\n
“Subclade K sort of got its own name because it was quite different, it had evolved quite a lot from recent other influenza AH3 viruses.<\/p>\n
“And the more that a flu virus evolves, the less our bodies are able to sort of remember it from previous flu seasons.”<\/p>\n
She said that meant there was probably not a lot of natural immunity in the community and that was why it was running through the population.<\/p>\n
“But the good news is that our vaccine was updated ahead of the season in the southern hemisphere to match the Subclade K and our labs testing to date shows that the strains circulating are a good match for the vaccine.<\/p>\n
“While this caused a really bad flu season in Europe in terms of absolute numbers, there’s a lot of flu, there wasn’t any sign that it caused more severe flu in people that got it.”<\/p>\n
Vaccinations as influenza rates ‘rocket’<\/p>\n
New data from Health New Zealand showed another nearly 6000 people have been vaccinated against the flu in the past week.<\/p>\n
There were 5328 vaccinated in early August and 7076 the week before that.<\/p>\n
Professor Michael Plank from the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Canterbury said influenza rates had “rocketed”.<\/p>\n
“The last time influenza indicators were this high was 2022, which was the year of the post-pandemic rebound,” he said. “With the very rapid rate of epidemic growth, it is possible we will even exceed the 2022 peak in the next few weeks, before levels hopefully begin to come down, as spring approaches.”<\/p>\n
He said the vaccine formulation appeared to be well matched to the current strain and encouraged people to get the jab.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Auckland has had its worst week for flu hospital admissions in a decade. There were 177 people admitted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":575178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[51,42,134,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-575177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-auckland","tag-headlines","tag-health","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/575178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Weekly](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/weekly-hospitalisation-rates-with-sari-in-auckland-I2GHFLDKXBBIVJFPPO446JMC6I.png\")
<\/p>\n