Northern Manitoba passed the 100-case threshold for positive COVID-19 tests Oct. 26, with 10 new cases announced, bringing the regional total to 106 since the start of the pandemic, with 66 of those cases currently considered active.
The new cases included three in The Pas/Opaskwayak Cree Nation/Kelsey health district, which now has the most active cases in the region with 22, two in the Thompson/Mystery Lake health district, which has 15 active cases and 19 recoveries, and one in the Shamattawa/York Factory/Tataskweyak/Split Lake district health district, which now has three active cases and seven recoveries. There were also four new cases in the Cross Lake/Pimicikamak Cree Nation health district, which now has 10 active cases.
Six northern residents were in hospital due to COVID-19 on Monday, one of them in intensive care in Winnipeg, and the current test positivity rate in the region is 4.8 per cent.
Data regarding how many cases in the north are community-based – in which the source of infection can’t be identified, isn't currently available, said chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin at a Monday press conference.
“Right now with the way we’ve been contact tracing, we don’t have good numbers right now,” he said. “We haven’t been reporting the non-epi-linked cases. What we do know is that, provincewide, a growing number of our new cases are non-epi-linked which is guiding us to think that we’re getting back to too many gatherings.”
Although the highest number of close contacts per case has been seen in the Winnipeg region, Roussin says the trend in all regions is that current active cases have more contacts than they did earlier in the pandemic.
“We have definitely seen increasing numbers of contacts there,” he said of the Northern Regional Health Authority area. “We’ve now seen that cases are reporting increased numbers of contacts in general.”
With Halloween coming up on Saturday, Roussin said people can’t approach the holiday as usual.
“We shouldn’t be having Halloween parties outside our household,” he said.
The province isn’t advising people to avoid trick-or-treating, but to do it with safety in my mind if they go out themselves or hand out candy to those who do.
“There’s ways of making that safe but nothing we do is without risk,” Roussin said.
In the past week, Roussin said, Manitoba has seen 14 deaths due to COVID-19 and 831 new cases.
“On this trajectory we expect to have more than 5,000 cases by the end of the month,” he said. On Monday, the total number of cases since the pandemic began was 4,349. “These numbers are trending in the wrong direction. We let the virus off the hook.”
Recently, Roussin said that public health has seen people who attended a funeral with many others, leading to a high number of close contacts, as well as someone attending a medical procedure without informing staff that they were a close contact of a known case of the virus, which led to an entire surgical team being forced to stay home and self-isolate for two weeks. Other problematic behaviours included a person who worked for a week while symptomatic before getting tested, a person who left work because they were ill and then went shopping and someone who had testd positive hosting a gathering at their home and exposing many people.
If you can’t identify how many people you’ve been in contact with over the past week, Roussin said, it will be difficult for public health staff to conduct case investigations
Province-wide, 100 new cases of COVID-19 were announced on Monday and the provincial test positivity rate is 7.1 per cent. One additional death was announced Monday, a woman in her 80s in Winnipeg whose cases is linked to the Parkview Place outbreak. That is the 55th death in the province since the pandemic began. There are 80 people in hospital due to COVID-19, 15 of them in intensive care.
Due to the current pandemic situation, Roussin and Manitoba chief nursing officer Lanette Siragusa will be hosting three press conferences a week – on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, for the foreseeable future.
