1 death reported in Manitoba as COVID-related hospitalizations drop 4

Manitoba is reporting another death and four fewer people in hospital with COVID-19 on the province's online dashboard Tuesday.

The death was a person from the Prairie Mountain Health region, bringing the total deaths from COVID-19 in the province to 1,717.

There are now 410 Manitobans with COVID-19 in hospital, including 18 in intensive care units — down two since Monday.

The total number of people in Manitoba ICUs, including both COVID and non-COVID patients, went up four to 97 on Tuesday, a Shared Health spokesperson said in an email.

The province's five-day test positivity rate dipped slightly to 15.5 per cent from 15.6 per cent the day before.

On Monday, 990 PCR tests were done in Manitoba.

Another 180 new COVID-19 cases were confirmed by through PCR tests on Tuesday. The province is limiting access to the tests and not tracking the results of rapid antigen tests, so this is a significant undercount of the true number of cases in the province. 

There are 59 new cases in the Winnipeg health region, 46 in the Northern Health Region, 41 in the Interlake-Eastern health region, 21 in the Prairie Mountain Health region and 13 in the Southern Health region.

There are currently 5,661 cases of COVID-19 listed as active in Manitoba, but that again is considered an undercount due to the lack of access to testing.

Manitoba's last pandemic public health orders ended Tuesday.

It's now no longer mandatory, only strongly recommended, for people to wear masks in indoor public places. Some organizations and businesses have chosen to continue to require them.

Meanwhile, the number of people who are vaccinated against COVID-19 continues to inch up.

As of Tuesday, 86.3 per cent of eligible Manitobans have at least one dose of the vaccine, 82.4 per cent have at least two and 44.3 per cent have three.