172 new COVID-19 cases, 3 deaths reported in Manitoba on Thursday

There are 172 new COVID-19 cases and three more deaths reported in Manitoba on Thursday, the province's online coronavirus dashboard says.

About 60 per cent of the new cases are among people who aren't fully immunized against COVID-19, the dashboard says. 

Eighty-nine cases are in people who are not vaccinated at all, while nine are in people partly immunized and 74 are among people fully vaccinated against the illness.

More than one-third of the latest cases are in the province's Southern Health region, which has 65 new infections. That region also has some of Manitoba's lowest vaccination rates.

The rest are split between the Winnipeg health region with 48 cases, the Northern Health Region with 27, the Interlake-Eastern health region with 18 and the Prairie Mountain Health region with 14.

The latest cases bring Manitoba's seven-day average of daily new COVID-19 infections down slightly to 131.

More details about the people who died, including their age ranges and health regions, are expected in the province's next news release on Friday.

There are now 147 COVID-19 patients hospitalized in Manitoba, the coronavirus dashboard says, up four since Wednesday. 

As of midnight, there were a total of 98 patients in Manitoba's intensive care units, a Shared Health spokesperson said in an email. That includes 24 patients diagnosed with COVID-19, the province's coronavirus dashboard says.

Before the pandemic, the critical care program's baseline capacity was 72 patients, the spokesperson said.

The number of active COVID-19 cases in Manitoba is now 1,356.

Manitoba's five-day test positivity rate dropped slightly to 5.1 per cent on Thursday, down from 5.2 on Wednesday.

Broken down by health region, the five-day test positivity rate ranges from a high of 15 per cent in Southern Health to a low of 2.7 per cent in the Winnipeg region, says internal provincial government data shared with the CBC. The Northern and Interlake-Eastern regions are both at 6.6 per cent, while Prairie Mountain is at 5.8.

The province did 3,334 more tests for the illness on Wednesday.

To date, 65,486 people have recovered from COVID-19 in Manitoba, the dashboard says.

There are 51 more COVID-19 cases linked to schools across the province, the Manitoba schools dashboard says.

There are 41 more cases in students and 10 in staff, and eight more schools have reported cases of the illness, the dashboard says.

A map of which schools have announced COVID-19 cases and how many infections have been reported at each is available on the province's website.