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A Winnipeg boy under the age of 10 has died from COVID-19, becoming the youngest person in Manitoba to lose his life from the disease.
The number of people hospitalized with the coronavirus continued its steady rise on Saturday, hitting a record high of 327, up from 322 on Friday, the province said in a news release. Of these, 44 people are in intensive care.
The sad updates come as Manitoba announces 487 new cases of the disease, the third highest increase in a single day to date.
Of the other nine deaths announced on Saturday, five are linked to known outbreaks in Manitoba.
They include a man in his seventies and a woman in his nineties linked to Gilbert Plains Personal Care Home; a man in his 80’s with ties to Fairview Home in Brandon; an 80-year-old woman connected to the Heritage Lodge long-term care home in Winnipeg; and a man in his 90s linked to Park Manor Care in Winnipeg.
The remaining deaths announced on Saturday are two women (aged 60 to 80) from the Winnipeg Health Region; a man in his 60s from the Interlake-Eastern Health region; and an 80-year-old woman from the southern health region, the province’s press release said.
The latest deaths bring the number of deaths linked to Manitoba’s coronavirus to 290.
The province has reported COVID-19 outbreaks in Unit GD4 at the Health Sciences Center in Winnipeg and at the Manitoba Developmental Center in Portage la Prairie, a long-term care facility for residents with intellectual disabilities. Both sites have been moved to the critical red level in the province’s pandemic response system, the statement said.
Meanwhile, the previously reported outbreaks at La Broquerie’s Arborgate School and Reston School have ended.
The provincial chief public health officer warned again on Friday that Manitoba’s health capacity has been pushed to its limits, with a record number of COVID-19 patients in hospital and dozens in intensive care.
“We will not be able to have sufficient capacity to hold these numbers for much longer,” Dr. Brent Roussin said at a news conference.
Manitoba’s five-day test positivity rate – a moving average of COVID-19 tests returning positive – is again slightly below 14.2%. In Winnipeg, that rate is now 13.9 percent, the province says.
There have now been 16,118 cases of COVID-19 identified in Manitoba, 6,804 of which are considered recovered.
A further 9,024 cases are still considered active, although Roussin previously said the number is inflated due to a data entry backlog.
Nearly two-thirds of the new cases announced on Saturday (307) are in the Winnipeg Health Region, while another fifth (104) are in the Southern Health Region.
The remaining cases are distributed in the Northern Health Region (38), the Interlake-Eastern Health Region (23) and the Prairie Mountain Health Region (15).
On Friday, another 2,640 COVID-19 tests were carried out in Manitoba, the press release said, bringing the total completed in the province since the beginning of February to 348,768.
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