No COVID-19 deaths in Manitoba on Monday, 61 new cases

WINNIPEG -

No new COVID-19 deaths were announced on Monday and health officials said 61 new cases have been identified in Manitoba.

The last time Manitoba reported no deaths from COVID-19 was a month ago on May 28, 2021, and this is the lowest daily case total since April 6, 2021, when 62 cases were announced.

The province's total COVID-19 case count is 56,036.

The five-day test positivity rate in Manitoba is 6.2 per cent and 5.8 per cent in Winnipeg.

Winnipeg had 27 new cases, followed closely by the Interlake-Eastern Health Region with 20.

The other three health districts all had single-digit case counts; eight cases in the Northern Health Region, four cases in the Southern Health region, and two cases in the Prairie Mountain Health Region.

Manitoba currently has 1,454 active cases and 53,443 people have recovered.

Hospital numbers have continued to decrease with under 100 people with active COVID-19. Officials said 95 people have active COVID-19 in hospital and 88 are no longer infectious but still need care.

Of the active cases, 26 are in ICU and there are another 24 who are no longer infectious, but still need intensive care.

Manitoba also has 11 people still out of province in ICU, all of which are in Ontario.

On Sunday, 1,468 tests were performed, bringing the total to 828,130 since February 2020.

Monday’s case count comes one day after the province announced the death of a girl under the age of 10 from COVID-19. During his news conference, Dr Brent Roussin, the chief provincial public health officer, called the death, “another tragedy of this pandemic.”

He added underlying health conditions were present in the child, but did not go into further detail due to privacy concerns.

Roussin offered advice to any parents who may be concerned for their children who are too young to receive a vaccine.

"It doesn't really change our messaging about the fundamentals. We are going to try to limit our contacts outside of the household right now, when we do have contacts with people outside our household we try to do it in lower risk settings. Smaller group sizes, outdoors, still trying to maintain that distance whenever possible," said Roussin.

He added when it comes to children, the risk of transmission is lower compared to older people and the risk of severe outcomes is also much lower.

Roussin also had a message for the province as a whole regarding loosened restrictions.

He wanted to remind people that even though the province is slowly opening up and the case count is dropping, Manitoba is not out of the woods yet.

"We were in a place to move to that step one and you can see that step one still has numerous restrictions, still fairly tight restrictions," said Roussin. "If we start losing sight of this virus and dramatically increasing the amount of contacts we have, then we are certainly at risk of seeing a resurgence of cases."

He said the reopening is allowing people to enjoy more of the summer, but Manitobans must be mindful of the health orders.

"There are a lot of things we can do (to) loosen these restrictions and get more and more enjoyment out of this summer. But at the same time we can stay mindful of this virus, because we do not want to turn around our progress at this point."