Omicron COVID case in Winnipeg child care centre

A case of the Omicron variant has been identified in a Winnipeg child care centre.

A letter was sent to parents of Little Voyageur Learning Centre Site 1 on Saturday confirming a previously reported COVID-19 case was identified as Omicron.

The letter was posted to Twitter by a Manitoba-based account that shares COVID outbreak notices in Manitoba.

The letter said all members of the household would need to self isolate --- regardless of vaccination status --- as per Manitoba Public Health and receive a negative test result.

“Public health will be reviewing all the children results and calling back families to let them know that they can now get out of self isolation,” the letter reads.

Little Voyageurs said it would be temporarily closed because 18 of their staff are now required to be tested, and their results need to be cleared by Public Health before they can return to work,

The letter states the Centre is expected to reopen on December 15.

Little Voyageur originally sent a letter on December 5 to parents that said two cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the Centre. The Centre decided to close all their preschool programs at the time because all the children were considered to be close contacts. Saturday’s letter confirmed one of the cases was the omicron variant.

A parent from the Little Voyageurs program who wanted to remain anonymous confirmed he had received the letters, he said he was very pleased with how the daycare was handling the exposures.

“As a parent, I feel like their protocols, procedures, and communications have been absolutely first rate,” he said in an email to CTV News.

“Having the dubious honor of the first publicly-known omicron exposure is just awful…they are a great daycare, and this is just such bad luck.”

A health update from the province on Friday said there’s five confirmed cases of the Omicron variant in Manitoba.

CTV News has reached out to Little Voyageur Learning Centre for comment.