COVID-19 numbers not good in PMH

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This article was published 10/12/2020 (2107 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As level red restrictions remain in place for the entire province, Manitobans have continued to wonder why regions outside the capital are locked down when Winnipeg remains the epicentre of COVID-19 cases.

However, looking at the per capita daily case number for Prairie Mountain Health shows that the region isn’t much better off than when cases spiked during the late summer.

Back in August and early September, PMH was the hot spot for COVID-19 in Manitoba. Because of high case counts, including dozens of cases among employees at the Maple Leaf Foods pork processing plant in Brandon, the region was the first to be put under level orange restrictions under the province’s four-tiered pandemic response system.

The worst day of that level orange period was Aug. 22, when the province reported 68 new cases of COVID-19 in Prairie Mountain Health.

The next time a region was placed under orange restrictions was late October, when Winnipeg was bumped up to that level and then was upgraded to level red restrictions at the beginning of November. At this point, the rest of Manitoba was put under code orange restrictions.

On Nov. 12, the entire province was moved to code red, but Winnipeg continues to lead the pack in terms of new daily cases.

After Nov. 1, when 55 new cases were reported in Winnipeg, the health region has not had a single day where fewer than 100 cases have been reported.

Prairie Mountain Health’s daily case counts have been lower, but there has been a clear trend upward in cases since mid-October. Increases in case counts haven’t always come on consecutive days, but the average case count is higher.

On average, there were 13.4 cases per day in August. In November, the average case count was 13.8. Since the beginning of December, the average daily case count has been 19.3.

While Winnipeg consistently has higher numbers, the graphs accompanying this article show that there have been days where there has been very little difference in the daily per capita case count per 100,000 residents of Prairie Mountain Health and Winnipeg.

The per capita statistics for this article and the accompanying graphs were created by dividing the number of daily cases for each region, dividing them by the population for each region as listed in a 2019 document from Manitoba Health and then multiplying them by 100,000.

Take for example Dec. 7, when Winnipeg had a per capita daily case count of 17.6 compared to Prairie Mountain Health’s per capita case count of 16.33.

The daily case numbers announced by chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin show a large gap between cases in Winnipeg and the rest of the province, but that gap shrinks when looking at per-capita figures.

Save for a couple of daily spikes back in August, the numbers show that Prairie Mountain Health is doing slightly worse in managing COVID-19 than it was earlier in the year.

Overall daily case totals for the province have trended downward slightly since setting a record high 593 cases on Nov. 22, but with Roussin warning that current levels are still unsustainable for the province’s health-care system, it may be a while before any part of the province has its restrictions relaxed.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark