One death, 135 new cases of COVID-19 announced Saturday in Manitoba

WINNIPEG — The province announced one death and 135 new COVID-19 infections on Saturday.

The death is a female in her 80s from the Winnipeg health region, bringing the provincial death toll to 949, as one case was removed due to a data correction.

The majority of the new cases are in the Winnipeg health region with 71. The Northern health region had 33, Southern Health-Santé Sud had 18, Prairie Mountain had nine and another four were reported in the Interlake-Eastern health region.

The province currently has 1,259 active cases of the virus, bringing the total number of lab-confirmed cases in Manitoba to 35,104.

The current provincial five-day test positivity rate sits at 5.7 per cent, with Winnipeg at 5.2 per cent.

There are a total of 141 people in hospital because of COVID-19, with 32 patients in the ICU.

Of those hospitalized, 63 have active cases of COVID and 14 are in the ICU.

The remaining 78 people are no longer infectious but still require care, with 18 of those cases in the ICU.

The total number of variants of concern sits at 412. The B.1.1.7 variant is the most prevalent with 364 screened or sequenced cases. Another 20 cases of the B.1.351 have been identified with the province noting another 28 cases have not been categorized.

Two additional outbreaks have been declared:Donwood Manor in Winnipeg and Boyne Lodge Personal Care Home in Carmen. Both have been moved to the critical level on the pandemic response system.

An outbreak at St. Michael’s Ukrainian Church in Sarto was been declared over.

The province has now completed 601,994 COVID-19 tests since early February of last year, after 2,031 tests were performed on Friday.