Manitoba will no longer provide data on coronavirus variants as 98% of cases are now delta

Manitoba will stop reporting how many COVID-19 cases are linked to coronavirus variants at the end of the week, because nearly all cases are the highly contagious delta variant.

Chief Provincial Public Health Officer Dr. Brent Roussin said 98 per cent of cases in Manitoba at this time are the delta variant, also called B.1.617.2.

"Because of this dominance, there's really no benefit clinically or from a public health perspective to report this information. It's the dominant strain by far," he said in an online news conference on Wednesday.

"We're still going to be monitoring for variants of concern, screening and sequencing of samples to make sure there's no change in our epidemiology, but there's no real benefit in reporting this as almost all cases reported in Manitoba are the delta variant."

That means the province won't update its online variant of concern dashboard, nor will it say whether a person's death is linked to a variant of concern after Friday.

The delta variant accounted for just over one-third of COVID-19 cases in July.

Scientists estimate delta is spreading roughly 50 per cent faster than the alpha variant, which was 50 per cent more contagious than the original virus strain, according to the Yale School of Public Health.

Manitoba's Southern Health region has low vaccine uptake and a high rate of hospitalization.

"The amount of the proportion of severe outcomes coming from the region are concerning to us," Roussin said.

On Wednesday, of the 153 people in hospital in Manitoba with COVID-19, 50 — nearly a third — are from Southern Health. The region has just 15 per cent of Manitoba's population.

The five-day test positivity rate in Southern Health is 17.4 per cent, numbers obtained by the CBC say, compared to a provincial rate of 5.9 per cent.

"I'm certainly concerned about that level of transmission we're seeing," Roussin said.