50 new COVID-19 cases, 2 deaths in Manitoba on Sunday

There are 50new COVID-19 cases in Manitoba on Sunday and twomore people have died after getting the illness, the province says in a news release.

Manitoba's five-day COVID-19 test positivity rate is still 3.7 per cent, the release says, while Winnipeg's dropped to 2.7 per cent from 3.2 on Saturday.

Most of the new cases are split evenly between the Northern Health Region and the Winnipeg health region, the release says, each with 21 new infections. There are also five new cases in the Southern Health region, two in the Interlake-Eastern health region and one in the Prairie Mountain Health region.

The deaths announced Sunday are both in the Winnipeg health region: a man in his 80s and a woman in her 90s.

There are now 192 COVID-19 patients hospitalized in Manitoba, up by three since Saturday. Twenty-six people are in intensive care, down by one.

Manitoba has now received 108,460 doses of COVID-19 vaccine and administered 75,448 of them, the province's online vaccination dashboard says. As of Sunday, 2.7 per cent of Manitoba's adult population has been fully vaccinated against the illness, the dashboard says.

The latest deaths bring Manitoba's total fatalities linked to the coronavirus to 895.

There have now been 31,859 COVID-19 cases identified in Manitoba, including 29,770 people considered to have recovered and 1,194 cases still deemed active, the release says. Health officials have said that number may be inflated by a data entry backlog.

The province announced no new cases of the B117 coronavirus variant first identified in the U.K. on Sunday. Manitoba has still identified only five, including one earlier this week.

There were 1,866 COVID-19 tests done in the province on Saturday, bringing the total number of the swabs completed in Manitoba since early last February to 525,373.