127 COVID-19 cases, 1 death reported in Manitoba on Tuesday as hospitalizations spike

There are 127 new COVID-19 cases and one death posted on the Manitoba government's online data website on Tuesday.

The Southern Health region has nearly 40 per cent of the new cases, with 50.

The Winnipeg health region has the next highest number with 27, followed by the Northern Health Region with 26, the Prairie Mountain Health region with 17 and the Interlake-Eastern health region with seven.

The seven-day average daily case count in Manitoba is now 122. That is a new fourth-wave high and the highest since June 23, when it was 126.

The climbing case numbers have also pushed the province's five-day test positivity rate up to five per cent, the highest since early July. There is no update on the rate for Winnipeg, which was at 1.6 per cent on Monday.

The Manitoba government no longer holds news conferences or sends news releases on Tuesdays to update case numbers, although some figures are available online. News releases are sent on Mondays and Thursdays.

As a result, no details about the age or sex of the latest death is available, but provincial data says the person who died is from the Southern Health region.

The total number of deaths in Manitoba since the pandemic started is now 1,249. That includes 239 due to variants of concern.

The total number of people in hospital has passed 100 for the first time since late July. It is now 104 (up from 98 on Monday). That number includes 24 people in intensive care units.

The number of active COVID-19 cases in the province jumped to 1,303, up 30 from Monday.

Of the 127 cases reported Tuesday, 75 (59 per cent) are in people who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 and three are in people who were partly vaccinated, the province's dashboard says.

The other 49 (39 per cent) are in fully vaccinated people.

Among people hospitalized with active cases of COVID-19, 65 per cent are unvaccinated, while 30 per cent are fully vaccinated.

As for patients in intensive care units with active COVID-19 symptoms, 83 per cent are not vaccinated and 17 per cent are fully vaccinated.

As of midnight, there were 91 people in Manitoba's intensive care units — both COVID-19 and non-COVID patients — a Shared Health spokesperson said in an email. The critical care program's normal, pre-COVID baseline capacity was 72 patients.

The province also identified 273 more cases of variants of concern on its online variant dashboard.

Another 206 have been added to the unspecified list, which means they have not yet been classified as one of the known variants. There are 67 more listed as the B.1.617.2, or delta, variant.

There were 2,331 lab tests completed on Monday, for a total of 1,094,672 since the pandemic began.

As of Tuesday, 86.9 per cent of eligible Manitobans have received one dose of a coronavirus vaccine and 83.8 per cent have both, the provincial vaccine dashboard says.

The total number of doses administered in the province is now at 2,088,282.

School cases

The total number of COVID-19 cases linked to schools since classes started on Sept. 7 is now 617, the province's dashboard on school data says.

Of those, 529 are student cases and 88 are staff. There have been 196 schools that have reported one or more cases.

Within the last 14 days, the period in which cases are considered active, there have been 222 cases: 186 student cases and 36 staff cases across 96 schools.

There are 817 schools in the province.

A map showing school-associated cases within the last 14 days can be seen here.