Health officials in Manitoba are set to give the latest news on COVID-19 in the province on Wednesday afternoon.
CBC News will live stream the update here at 12:30 p.m. Manitobans will hear from Dr. Jazz Atwal, acting deputy chief provincial public health officer, and Dr. Joss Reimer, a medical officer of health for Manitoba Health and a member of the province’s COVID-19 vaccine implementation task force.
The news conference comes one day after the province floated possible changes to public health orders that will expire on Friday.
Those possible tweaks, which are being considered for all regions but the hard-hit north, include allowing some small gatherings and scrapping restrictions on what can be sold in stores.
Manitoba also is reassessing how many vaccine appointments can be booked after the already reduced Pfizer-BioNTech shipments the province expected to get over the next few weeks were cut in half.
The slowdown comes after Pfizer temporarily paused some production lines as it aims to expand manufacturing capacity in the long term.
Help is on the way for Garden Hill First Nation in northern Manitoba, after federal Public Safety Minister Bill Blair approved a request for assistance from the Canadian Armed Forces for the community as it deals with an outbreak.
Cases in Manitoba’s Northern Health Region were down slightly on Tuesday; the area saw 500 new cases last week.
On Monday, the Manitoba Metis Federation opened a COVID-19 testing site for Métis people in and around Winnipeg.
The organization partnered with a local bioinformation services firm after it was unable to get information from the province on how many Métis people in Manitoba have tested positive for COVID-19, president David Chartrand said.
Meanwhile, federal Northern Affairs Minister Dan Vandal wrote to Premier Brian Pallister, asking that the federation to be included in the province’s vaccine task force and distribution plans. Vandal is also the member of Parliament for Winnipeg’s St. Boniface-St. Vital riding.
Manitoba has reported 229 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 15 more coronavirus-linked deaths since Monday.
The province’s latest fatalities include a tally of 11 on Tuesday, the first time that number was in the double digits in nearly two weeks.
Those numbers are a marked improvement from two months ago, when daily case counts hovered around the low 400s and on one day peaked at 546 new cases.
Manitoba’s five-day test positivity rate, a rolling average of the COVID-19 tests that come back positive, has also been trending downward, though fewer people are being tested for the illness.
The decreasing numbers are why Manitoba is now in a position to consider loosening some of its pandemic rules, Chief Provincial Public Health Officer Dr. Brent Roussin said on Tuesday.
