Manitoba COVID-19 test positivity at lowest mark since September as province reports 29 new cases, 1 death

Manitoba reported 29 new COVID-19 cases and one additional deathon Friday, according to the provincial pandemic dashboard.

Of the latest cases, 15 are in the Interlake-Eastern health region,10 in the Winnipeg health region, threein the Southern Health region andone in the Prairie Mountain Health region. There are nonein the Northern Health Region.

The Manitoba government no longerholds news conferences or issues news releases on Fridays to update the case numbers, although figures are available online. As a result, no information about the latest deathis available.

The formerly daily bulletins are now only sent out on Mondays and Thursdays.

The online data dashboardsays the total number of Manitobans who have died from COVID-19 is now 1,184, including 187 due to variants of concern.

There are currently92 Manitobans hospitalized with COVID-19, an increase of one from Thursday.Of those, 15 are in intensive care. That's a drop of two from Thursday.

Dropping positivity

The current five-day test positivity rate in Manitoba is 1.9per cent, down from 2.1 on Thursday. No data is provided for Winnipeg, which was at 1.8 per cent on Thursday.

This is the first time the provincial rate has been below two per cent since September.It was 1.8 per cent onSept. 22.

That's a far distance from the third-wave peak of 14.5 per cent onMay 23.

There were 1,677 COVID-19 tests completed on Thursday, the dashboard says. That brings the total number of laboratory tests done since early February 2020 to 882,690.

The province also identified 15 more cases as being linked to variants, theonline variant dashboardsays. All are currently categorized as unspecified.