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Manitoba releases COVID-19 modelling hours after reopening plans

Manitoba’s COVID-19 efforts were front and centre April 29, with the province releasing both details on the province's back-to-work plans and its first set of public modelling hours apart. Dr.
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Manitoba’s COVID-19 efforts were front and centre April 29, with the province releasing both details on the province's back-to-work plans and its first set of public modelling hours apart.

Dr. Brent Roussin, Manitoba chief public health officer, said the model relased April 29 was finalized earlier this week.

“We decided that we would share this now to help support why we feel it’s safe to start loosening some of these restrictions,” he said.

“We wanted to show where we are, where we could have been and why we’re using our data to support loosening some of these restrictions.”

All of the data points Roussin presented were related to current public health measures, which will start to be loosened May 4 with the opening of some non-essential businesses and services. He said despite the incoming change, Manitoba’s projections are forward looking.

“Projections three months from now are rarely accurate,” Roussin said.

“The longer you model ahead, the less meaningful [the model becomes]… We are looking at making our models predict different levels of public health interventions. It’s not an exact science to know the exact effects to model as we lift some of these restrictions.”

Roussin said the current model projected a range centred around 500 total cases by May 8 and as many as 6,250 cases by the end of the year. Manitoba has detected 273 cases of COVID-19 as of April 29.

Roussin said this modelling can’t say much about individual health regions, but more detailed projections could be released in the future with more data.

“These models are based on Manitoba’s population. That’s the benefit of what we call ‘agent-based’ modelling,” he said.

“We can plug in Manitoba specific demographics and criteria, rather than just extrapolating from other jurisdictions. This is all of Manitoba, but it takes into account a lot of the demographics that we see in Manitoba.”

Travel restrictions for northern Manitoba will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

Roussin said the province will be tracking all numbers, but will be paying close attention to the percentage of tests that are positive. That rate has been well under one per cent over the last five days.

“If that rate starts climbing, into the three, four, five per cent range, then that’s going to certainly start raising some flags for us,” he said.

“We’re going to look at hospital capacity, as well as intensive care units, so we have a number of indicators we are going to follow very carefully. We’re not going to lift any measures until we’re confident this phase has not affected our response.”

Roussin added the province has the ability to roll back any and all loosening of restrictions.

Officials announced one new case. With recoveries, Manitoba’s active cases went down to 54. Manitoba has processed over 24,000 COVID-19 tests.

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