Manitoba Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Brent Roussin announced 53 new cases of COVID-19 this afternoon bringing the five day test positivity rate to 4.2 percent. He announced no additional deaths. Of the new cases 27 are in the Northern health region and 21 in Winnipeg region with single digits in other regions. He also reported 136 new screened and sequenced cases of variants of concern have been detected with five from the Interlake Eastern health region, 14 from Southern health and 117 from the Winnipeg region. The total number of confirmed variant of concern cases in the province is now 259. Roussin had a warning about travelling and gathering over spring break and Easter. He says he knows that this is the time when many of us want to celebrate as per the usual manner but we can see with the growing number of variants of concern seeing what’s happening around us we just can’t do that at this point. He notes we saw where that got us over Thanksgiving and we just can’t be in that place again as they continue to roll out the vaccine as that’s the race we’re in right now.
Of the total 33,975 reported COVID cases 1177 are considered active and 31, 864 individuals have recovered.
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Dr. Joss Reimer medical lead of the province's vaccine task force says Manitoba is also limiting the use of the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine to people between the ages of 55 and 64 as more information is being sought around some adverse symptoms in younger people noticed in the United Kingdom.(CP)
