The number of COVID-19 patients in Manitoba hospitals and intensive care units continued to rise Monday, as health officials announced 430 new infections and the death of another person connected to the virus.
The virus’s latest victim is a man in his 60s from the Southern Health region, and he is the 1,011th Manitoban with COVID-19 to die since March 2020.
Manitoba continues to see high daily case counts and rising hospitalization rates. As of Sunday, Manitoba also has the highest per capita infection rate in Canada.
Numbers reported on Health Canada’s website show Manitoba is Canada’s COVID-19 hot spot with a seven-day average rate of 33.1 cases per 100,000.
“Manitobans are all tired of the public health orders and restrictions, tired of hearing of the fundamentals, but we need to ensure we’re all still familiar with how severe COVID-19 is,” Manitoba’s chief public health officer, Dr. Brent Roussin said Monday.
“We could see in January and February of this year, our collective actions make a big difference — we saw our case counts coming down, we were able to get back to some of the health-care services that had to be delayed in the second wave.
“We’re in that scenario again, we need to bring down these numbers, there’s far too much strain on our health-care system.”
Manitoba health officials reported last week that the province is already outpacing their worst-case scenario projections.
There were 265 people are in hospital and 73 people in intensive care units linked to COVID-19 as of Monday morning. A day earlier, health officials said 258 people were in hospital and 71 people in ICUs connected to the virus.
Monday’s new infections come from across the province, but the majority — 313 — were reported in Winnipeg.
Another 44 cases were found in the Southern Health region, 37 were reported in the Northern Health region, and 18 were found in both the Interlake-Eastern and Prairie Mountain Health regions.
