Manitoba COVID-19 test positivity at lowest mark since September as province reports 29 new cases, 1 death
CBC News | Posted: August 6, 2021 5:32 PM | Last Updated: August 6, 2021
Manitoba reported 29 new COVID-19 cases and one additional death on Friday, according to the provincial pandemic dashboard.
Of the latest cases, 15 are in the Interlake-Eastern health region, 10 in the Winnipeg health region, three in the Southern Health region and one in the Prairie Mountain Health region. There are none in the Northern Health Region.
The Manitoba government no longer holds news conferences or issues news releases on Fridays to update the case numbers, although figures are available online. As a result, no information about the latest death is available.
The formerly daily bulletins are now only sent out on Mondays and Thursdays.
The online data dashboard says the total number of Manitobans who have died from COVID-19 is now 1,184, including 187 due to variants of concern.
There are currently 92 Manitobans hospitalized with COVID-19, an increase of one from Thursday. Of those, 15 are in intensive care. That's a drop of two from Thursday.
Dropping positivity
The current five-day test positivity rate in Manitoba is 1.9 per cent, down from 2.1 on Thursday. No data is provided for Winnipeg, which was at 1.8 per cent on Thursday.
This is the first time the provincial rate has been below two per cent since September. It was 1.8 per cent on Sept. 22.
That's a far distance from the third-wave peak of 14.5 per cent on May 23.
There were 1,677 COVID-19 tests completed on Thursday, the dashboard says. That brings the total number of laboratory tests done since early February 2020 to 882,690.
The province also identified 15 more cases as being linked to variants, the online variant dashboard says. All are currently categorized as unspecified.