The United States Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has raised its travel advisory warning on travel to New Zealand.

The CDC updated its travel warning to “level four: very high” for travel to New Zealand due to covid-19 cases, of which today alone there was 23,894 new cases recorded.

According to the Reuters’ Covid-19 tracker, covid-19 infections are decreasing in United States, with 49,611 new infections reported on average each day.

• READ MORE: Covid-19: 23,894 new cases today, 756 people in hospital — Ministry of Health
• Other NZ covid outbreak reports

The CDC states if people must travel to New Zealand they should ensure they are up-to-date with their covid-19 vaccinations.

The health warnings are determined by the “level of covid-19 in the country or other special considerations”.

Many countries have been rated with a level four risk warning by the CDC, including Australia. Hong Kong and Thailand were also added to the list today.

Travel restrictions were eased in New Zealand from last week, with returnees now not required to self-isolate upon arrival.

Record 23,894 new cases
The Ministry of Health reported a record 23,894 new cases of covid-19 today, with 9881 in Auckland.

In addition there are 756 people in hospital with covid-19 and 16 of those are in ICU. The seven-day rolling average of community cases is 18,669, up from yesterday.

Of the new cases, 596 were confirmed via PCR testing and 23,298 via rapid antigen tests (RATs).

At the covid-19 update today, Director of Public Health Dr Caroline McElnay said the actual number of cases in the community was expected to be considerably higher, but that was hard to gauge when using RAT as the primary test.

That was why the ministry was focusing on hospitalisations, McElnay said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.