147 new COVID-19 cases, 4 deaths reported in Manitoba on Friday

Manitoba reports 147 new COVID-19 cases and four deaths on Friday.

The Southern and Winnipeg health regions have 75 per cent of the new cases, with 64 and 46, respectively, a news release from the province says.

There are 16 cases in the Prairie Mountain Health region, 12 in the Interlake-Eastern health region and nine in the Northern Health Region.

Three of the four new deaths were in the Winnipeg health region: a man in his 70s, a woman in her 80s and a woman in her 100s. The other death, a man in his 70s, was in the Prairie Mountain Health region.

The province also released more details about three deaths reported on its dashboard on Thursday. There are no COVID-19 news releases issued on Thursdays, so only the numbers were reported.

Two of the deaths reported Thursday were from Southern Health: a woman in her 70s linked to an outbreak at Salem Home long-term care home in Winkler, and a man in his 90s linked to an outbreak at Third Crossing Manor in Gladstone. The third death was a man in his 80s from the Prairie Mountain Health region.

There have now been 1,328 deaths from COVID-19 in Manitoba.

The five-day COVID-19 test positivity rate is 5.1 per cent provincially and 2.7 per cent in Winnipeg. Both of those numbers are unchanged from Thursday.

Of the 147 new cases on Friday, 95 are in people not fully vaccinated: 53 from Southern Health, 28 from the Winnipeg region, six from the Interlake-Eastern region, five from the Northern Health Region and three from Prairie Mountain Health.

There are 141 people in hospital with COVID-19, which is a decline from 147 on Thursday. That includes 23 in intensive care units, a drop of one from Thursday.

As of midnight, there were 95 people — both COVID and non-COVID patients — in intensive care units across the province, a Shared Health spokesperson said in an email. The critical care program's normal, pre-COVID baseline capacity was 72 patients.

Among those hospitalized with active COVID-19, 51 per cent are unvaccinated and 44 per cent are fully vaccinated; five per cent are partly vaccinated.

When it comes to the most severe outcomes, however, the split is different. Of the patients being treated for active COVID-19 in intensive care units, 87.5 per cent are unvaccinated and 12.5 per cent are fully vaccinated.

So far, no cases of the B.1.1.529 variant, also known as omicron, have been detected in Manitoba. All positive travel-related specimens are being sequenced, the province said.

A federal travel ban has been put in place to control the spread of the new variant. Anyone returning from a country identified by Canada as requiring quarantine must self-identify their past 14-day travel history when seeking care at any health-care facility or if calling 911.

People who have travelled to any of the countries covered by the ban in the past 14 days will not be allowed to visit patients at health-care facilities.

There are currently 1,403 active COVID-19 cases in Manitoba and 65,577 people have recovered.

There were 2,896 laboratory tests completed on Thursday, bringing the total number of lab tests done since early February 2020 to 1,183,325.

More than 20K kids vaccinated

A total of 2,188,316 doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in Manitoba, including 20,337 first doses given to children age five to 11. That's about 16.2 per cent of the approximately 125,000 Manitoba children in that age group.

As of Friday, 81.1 per cent of all eligible Manitobans age five and up have received at least one dose of the vaccine and 77.2 per cent have received two doses, the vaccination dashboard says.

Many Manitoba vaccine sites are offering walk-in and by-appointment vaccinations for COVID and seasonal flu. Eligible individuals can book appointments online or by calling 1-844-626-8222 (1-844-MAN-VACC).

Vaccination site locations can be found on the Manitoba vaccine finder app. Hours and days of operation are available on the province's vaccine finder website.