Manitoba public health reported 479 new cases of COVID -19 have been identified since Friday bringing the five day test positivity rate to 3.9 percent.  Of those cases 161 were in Southern health and 106 in the Northern health region where there are 293 active cases with lower numbers in other regions.  Deputy Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Jazz Atwal says the increased cases in the north are in isolated areas.  He explains they do have one larger outbreak and one smaller outbreak in the Northern Health Region and obviously there’s a lot of communities up there and a lot of land as well.  He points out they do have a couple of First Nations communities that are experiencing an outbreak which is really skewing test numbers because these are isolated localized communities so that’s where things like case numbers and test positivity can look very skewed and we need to interpret those numbers depending on the population they’re looking at and the geographic area of the setting.            

Of the total 61,721 identified cases in the province 928 are now active.