Manitoba reported its highest one-day jump in COVID-19 cases in nearly three weeks on Thursday with 139 new infections.

The last time the province announced a daily case count that high was on Jan. 30, when there were 166 new cases. There were also 167 new cases announced on Tuesday, but that was two days' worth of cases following a hiatus on Louis Riel Day.

Manitoba also announced two more deaths linked to COVID-19 on Thursday: a man and a woman, both in their 70s, from the Winnipeg health region. They bring Manitoba's total coronavirus-linked fatalities to 878.

More than half of Thursday's new cases (75) are in the Northern Health Region and just over one-third (52) are in Winnipeg, the province says in a news release. The rest of the new cases are spread out among the Interlake-Eastern health region (five), the Southern Health region (four) and the Prairie Mountain Health region (three).

Manitoba's five-day COVID-19 test positivity rate rose to six per cent from 5.9 on Wednesday, while Winnipeg's rose to 4.4 per cent from 4.3.

There are 224 COVID-19 patients in hospital in Manitoba, down by seven from Wednesday. The number of people in intensive care is now 27, down by one.

One previously announced COVID-19 case was removed from Manitoba's total on Thursday because of a data correction, the release says. There have now been 31,145 cases of the illness detected in Manitoba.

Of those, 29,114 of those people are considered recovered, while 1,153 cases are still deemed active, though health officials have said that number is inflated by a data entry backlog.

There were 1,827 COVID-19 tests done in Manitoba on Wednesday, bringing the total number of swabs completed in the province to 506,511 since early February 2020, the release says.