Surgeries postponed, youth sports limited to vaccinated players due to rising COVID-19 numbers in Manitoba | CBC News
Manitoba will require youth to be vaccinated or regularly tested for COVID-19 to participate in indoor sports across the province beginning Dec. 5, and cancel some upcoming surgeries to free up hospital space, officials say.
The new rules will also bring limits to religious gatherings in the Southern Health region starting Saturday.
The cancelled health procedures will increase Manitoba’s intensive care bed capacity to 110. People whose procedures are getting postponed will get a call if the change affects them, Monika Warren, provincial COVID-19 operations chief at Shared Health, said at a news conference on Friday.
The new requirement for vaccines in indoor sports will apply to people age 12 to 17, Chief Provincial Public Health Officer Dr. Brent Roussin said.
Players will have to either have at least one vaccine dose or proof of a negative COVID-19 test within the past 72 hours in order to play starting Dec. 5.
Religious gatherings in the province’s Southern Health region that don’t require attendees to be vaccinated will be limited to 25 people unless the venue is able to split people up into separate rooms in groups of 25.
If the site is big enough to do that, gatherings will still be limited to 25 per cent capacity up to a maximum of 250 people, Roussin said.
Those new rules won’t apply to religious gatherings that require proof of vaccination to enter.
Southern Manitoba municipalities that are near Winnipeg and have already been exempt from targeted rules in the region won’t be affected by that requirement, Roussin said. Those communities are the areas of Cartier, Headingley, Macdonald, Ritchot, Niverville, St. François Xavier and Taché.
The Southern Health region has both Manitoba’s lowest vaccinations rates and by far the province’s highest test positivity rate.
On Wednesday, when the test positivity rate there stood at 15.6 per cent, according to internal provincial data leaked to CBC News, the rate was 3.4 per cent in Winnipeg.
The Winnipeg health region has the highest vaccination rate, at just over 89 per cent, compared to just above 68 per cent in Southern Health, the lowest of Manitoba’s five health regions.
The latest restrictions come after Manitoba’s daily case counts and hospitalizations have climbed significantly in the past three weeks.
There were 87 COVID-19 patients in hospital on Oct. 20. That number shot up to 143 by the middle of this week, a rise of 64 per cent.
As of Wednesday, the seven-day average for daily cases was 158, up from 85 on Oct. 20.
There’s also a spike in test positivity; the provincial rate went from 3.1 per cent on Oct. 21 to 6.2 per cent on Nov. 10.
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