Manitoba Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Brent Roussin announced 166 new cases of COVID-19 from Monday and today this afternoon bringing the five day test positivity rate to 5.9percent. He also reported four additional deaths all from the Winnipeg region. He also commented on test results from suspected variants of concern from across the province.  He explained they received the sequencing of seven of those samples and the sequencing shows they are not cases of the B117 variant of concern.  The screening works to find similar mutations that are present in the variant of concern but they’re certainly not diagnostic and so when sequenced out they needed finger printing of this genome and they find that this is very comparable to other genomes in the community, the province and the country and not the UK variant.

Of the new cases reported 93 are in the Northern health region and 51 from Winnipeg with lower numbers in other regions. Of the total 30,932 reported cases 1625 are considered active, 28,432 individuals have recovered and 230 are in hospital with 26 in intensive care.