Active and total COVID-19 cases in Manitoba continue to rise with greater speed in August than they have since the novel coronavirus pandemic began in the spring, with 38 new positive tests announced Aug. 17, bringing the total to 731 cases.
In the seven days leading up to Monday, more than 170 new cases of COVID-19 have been identified in the province, which now has 232 active cases and saw its ninth death resulting from the virus over the weekend. Most of the cases announced Aug. 17 were in the Prairie Mountain health region (20), followed by the southern health region (12), Winnipeg (five) and one in the Interlake-Eastern health region. The Northern Regional Health Authority (NRHA) area continues to be free of active cases and has only had three positive tests for the novel coronavirus since the pandemic began, with the last one occurring in the first week of April. Most of the new cases are related to known cases, said chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin, but there is some evidence of community-based transmission (infections that can’t be linked back to known cases) in Brandon and Winnipeg.
Numbers such as those the province is seeing now weren’t unexpected, Roussin said, though they have arrived earlier than public health experts were anticipating
“Most of us in public health were definitely expecting numbers like this and possibly worse in the fall respiratory virus season,” Roussin said.
The rising numbers are a cause for concern among parents of school-aged children as well as teachers and other education staff with the first day of school in the province about three weeks away and Roussin said there will likely be positive tests among students and staff following the reopening of schools, though he said there are no models to predict how many.
“That would be really tough to model,” he said. “I don’t know how we could come up with a useful number.”
Roussin said mandating mask use isn’t off the table but said that it isn’t a replacement for fundamental pandemic precautions such as good hand hygiene, physical distancing and avoiding crowded indoor places that some Manitobans seem to have eased up on when new case numbers dropped in June and then disappeared entirely for the first two weeks of July.
“These numbers are anxiety-provoking but we all have the ability right now to dramatically lower our risk and that’s those fundamentals,” Roussin said.
