Auckland is a thousand nurses short and lacks the capacity to deal with the amount of people self-isolating at home, according to the country's largest nurses' union.
There are currently 85 Covid-19 patients in hospital, including 11 in intensive care, and numbers are expected to climb.
The Nurses' Organisation spokesperson Christina Couling says patients are at risk because there are not enough nurses even at this stage of the outbreak, and the system's under enormous strain.
She says it simply does not have the capacity to deal with the number of people who are self-isolating at home, with several hundred referrals to DHBs each day.
Another 201 Covid-19 community cases were reported in New Zealand today.
See how the day's Covid-19 news unfolded with RNZ's blog:
