Manitoba reports 198 new COVID-19 cases, 1 death Friday

There are 198 new COVID-19 cases in Manitoba on Friday and one more person has died from the illness, the province says.

The latest infections bring the province's seven-day average case count to 173, the highest since the arrival of the pandemic's fourth wave in the province.

Nearly 60 per cent of the new cases (116) are among people who aren't fully immunized against COVID-19, the province said in a news release.

The Winnipeg health region accounted for 70 of the new infections, with 64 being reported in the Southern health region.

The Interlake-Eastern, Prairie Mountain and Northern health regions had 26, 23 and 15 cases, respectively.

There are now 142 people hospitalized with the illness in the province, down three since Thursday, with 35 of them in intensive care, unchanged since Thursday.

Twenty-seven of the people in intensive care have active COVID-19, while the other eight are no longer infections but continue to require critical care.

Those 35 people make up more than one-third of the patients in Manitoba's intensive care units. As of midnight, there were 99 people, up from 97, receiving critical care in ICUs, a spokesperson for Shared Health said in an email.

Before the pandemic, the province's intensive care units had a baseline capacity of 72.

As of Thursday, 83 per cent of eligible Manitobans have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, while 77.9 per cent are fully vaccinated.

The province has administered 37,546 first doses to children aged five to 11.

The five-day provincial test positivity rate dropped to 5.7 per cent — down from 6.1 on Thursday — and sits at 3.7 in Winnipeg. 

The latest death, a man in his 90s from the Winnipeg health region, brings Manitoba's total linked to the illness to 1,345.

The province also released more information about the three deaths reported Thursday. They were:

• A woman in her 50 from the Winnipeg health region.
• A man in his 50s from the Winnipeg health region.
• A man in his 60s from Southern Health region.

An outbreak has been declared at the transitional care unit in Winnipeg's Misericordia Health Centre. The facility has been moved to the critical level or red on the pandemic response system.

An outbreak has been declared over at a personal care home in Russell, Man.

There are 1,691 active cases of COVID-19 in the province, but no additional cases of the B.1.1.529 omicron variant have been reported. The total number of omicron cases in the province remains at five.

There were 3,390 laboratory tests completed Thursday, bringing the total number of lab tests since early February 2020 to 1,203,473, the province said.