107 new COVID-19 cases, 2 deaths reported in Manitoba Thursday

Manitoba public health officials say there are107 new COVID-19 cases and two deaths on Thursday.

The deaths announced Thursday were a man in his 40s from the Southern Health regionlinked to an unspecified variant of concern, and a woman in her 50s from the Northern Health Region, also linked to an unspecified variant of concern, says a news release from the province.

This brings the number of people who have died in Manitoba from COVID-19 to 1,226.

There are 45new cases in the Northern Health Region, 23in the Southern Health region, 21in the Winnipeg health region, 10 in the Prairie Mountain Health regionand eightin the Interlake-Eastern health region.

Of the new cases, 60 are in people who weren't vaccinated, eight are in people only partly vaccinatedand 39 are in people who are fully vaccinated, the province's online dashboard says.

As of Thursday, 82.2 per cent of the eligible population in Manitoba has two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, while 85.9 per cent has at least one dose.

There are 93 people in hospital with COVID-19, including 17 in intensive care. That's a decrease of just one patient from the day before.

As of midnight Wednesday,there were a total of 82patients in intensive care units in Manitoba, including both COVID-19patients and non-COVID-19 patients.

The critical care program's normal, pre-COVID baseline capacity was 72 patients.

The current five-day test positivity rate for Manitoba remains 3.8 per cent, while in Winnipeg it is 1.5 per cent.

There have been 87 more cases linked to more infectious variants of concern. Almost all of the increase was under unspecified variants, while two more cases were classified as the delta variant.