Following the recent trend, Northern Manitoba led the province’s five health districts in the number of new COVID-19 cases reported March 9, accounting for 36 of the 63 new cases across the province.
The vast majority of the new northern cases were from the Pukatawagan/Mathias Colomb health district, where 29 confirmed new cases of the virus were reported by the provincial government on Tuesday. Many other people have received positive results from rapid tests, said Mathias Colomb Cree Nation Chief Lorna Bighetty in an online press conference Tuesday, and there were a total of 101 confirmed or presumed positive residents as of Monday evening.
Up until last week there had only been 10 cases of the virus in Pukatawagan, which has about 3,000 residents, but recently there have ben 10 or 20 new cases a day, said Bighetty, who attributed the rapid rise to people socializing with each other.
“They don’t seem to understand the seriousness of the COVID,” she said. “I still see a lot of people roaming about, thinking of nothing but trying to mingle.”
Some of that may be because of spring weather, some due to COVID fatigue after almost a year of the pandemic and some a result of complacency among some of the 200 or so people who have received two doses of COVID-19 vaccine.
“They weren’t concerned. they just went out and about visiting each other. The numbers are growing on a daily basis,” said Bighetty, whose community has four members of the Canadian Armed Forces currently in town, along with 10 Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs ambassadors. More military personnel, ambassadors and the Red Cross are due to arrive in Pukatwagan soon to help it deal with the outbreak.
Other northern health districts reporting new COVID cases March 9 included Cross Lake/Pimicikamak, Island Lake and Thompson/Mystery Lake, with three new cases each.
War Lake First Nation has avoided having any cases so far, said Chief Betsy Kennedy, and a number of residents received their second doses of COVID vaccine March 4, the chief herself among them.
“I had no side effects or anything like that even with the first dose we had,” Kennedy said, noting that plans are underway to vaccinate everyone in the community aged 18 and over, though the details haven’t been ironed out yet.
Hospitalization numbers in Manitoba remained stable on Tuesday, with 163 total hospitalizations, including 55 people with active COVID infections. Ten of those with active infections were in intensive care, including five from the north. There were also 12 patients who are no longer considered infectious in ICU, two of them from the north. A total of 23 northerners are in hospital due to the virus, 16 of them with active infections.
Retroactive testing of positive COVID tests have turned up new samples containing variants of concern that originated in the United Kingdom and South Africa. There have been a total of 22 of these variants detected as of March 9, all in the Winnipeg region, up from nine on Monday.
The five-day test positivity rate in Manitoba was 3.8 per cent on Tuesday and one new death was announced, though the total number of deaths did not rise because one previous death was removed from the total of 907 due to a data correction.
