A man in his 60s from Cessnock is the latest resident to succumb to the virus in the Hunter, where 105 people are hospitalised, and 13 are in intensive care.

It comes as the district's public health controller Dr David Durrheim urged Hunter residents not to play "Russian roulette" with the virus by assuming a COVID infection was inevitable, and expecting to "get it over and done with".

"We are seeing some cases, including young children too, with bad outcomes," he said. "It is uncommon, but we don't know if that unlucky person is going to be us or a family member or friend, and we don't want to be the cause of someone else who is frail or immunocompromised getting it and having a bad outcome.

"It is not guaranteed that having the viral infection will provide you with robust immunity into the future... It depends on whether another variant comes, and what that variant is."

Officially, Hunter New England recorded 2,491 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, but that figure does not yet include the region's rapid antigen testing results that NSW Health began collecting this week.

More than 3000 Hunter residents registered positive RAT results via the ServiceNSW app, although Dr Durrheim explained that those numbers still needed further scrutiny to weed out duplications.

"We know that over 3000 people registered their RAT results in Hunter New England," he said. "But at the moment, the system still needs to de-duplicate them because some of these people have had more than one positive RAT, and they have reported them all, and some have had PCRs as well as registered RATs.

"The NSW government is working out how this can be done in a way that gives accurate numbers.

"You would be brave to try to make an estimate on Hunter numbers at the moment, but the numbers we are getting are certainly an underestimate."

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There was "very little" of the Delta variant in the region since it was been "swamped" by Omicron. There were 1,424 new cases recorded on the Central Coast.

Across the state, there were close to 92,000 positive test results recorded, including 30,541 cases reported from PCR tests in the 24 hours to 8pm Wednesday.

There were 61,387 positive RATs reported, although these tests included tests taken from as early as January 1; 50,729 of the tests were from the past seven days.

Dr Durrheim said that while it was "quite clear" that PCR tests were the gold standard for COVID detections, RATs were "incredibly useful" when there was such a high level of infection in the community.

"In a low-prevalence environment you would be quite concerned depending on them," he said. "Some are about 85 per cent sensitive, so you are going to miss about one in five - especially in early, asymptomatic infection. But really, anybody who is symptomatic or has been a household contact of someone with COVID and has symptoms is likely to be positive. If you have symptoms and get a negative RAT, don't believe it. Isolate and get re-tested."

A woman working at a Hunter testing clinic shared her concerns that RATs were too unreliable and inaccurate and they could give people a false sense of security.

"So many people - even nurses who know how to take a proper swab - tell us they've had a run of negative rapid tests but when the PCR results come back they are positive," she said.

Dr Durrheim urged people to get their booster shots.

He said that in the John Hunter ICU, they'd had 24 people admitted since mid-December specifically for COVID care. Of those, only one was "boosted".

He reassured parents that vaccinating children aged five to 11 for the virus was safe and effective.

"Children may be more likely to get a milder infection, but we have seen children have some bad outcomes - including a young child who died of COVID in South Australia. So it can be more severe in a proportion of people," he said. "Do we really want to take that chance? The vaccine is safe but the disease can have horrible outcomes.

"The vaccine never gets into your DNA and it is literally broken down within days at the site of injection," he said. "So it is really implausible that this will have any long term effects because it doesn't hang around in the body. It is really only using our cells' own machinery to generate our own immune response to protect us and our children against the virus."

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