COVID-19 by the numbers By: Winnipeg Free Press Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Tuesday, Apr. 7, 2020 Last Modified: 5:08 PM CDT Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022 Updates

Manitoba COVID-19 cases rise to 17; confirmed cases are travel-related

Manitoba is conducting more tests for the novel coronavirus — including a new drive-thru site that opened in Selkirk — while suspending breast cancer screening.

As of Wednesday morning, chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin said the province had thus far conducted 2,900 tests for COVID-19.

Hours later, two more presumptive positive cases were reported, bring the total of confirmed and presumptive cases to 17, with no reports of anyone requiring hospitalization. All but one still being tracked Wednesday are travel-related, Roussin said at a news conference.

While nine COVID-19 screening sites have opened in Manitoba in the last 10 days, breast cancer screening is on hold for two weeks, said Lanette Siragusa, Shared Health chief nursing officer.

Digital media an illusion of democracy

I recently finished reading The Obsolescence of the Human (Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen) by Günther Anders, a German philosopher and critical theorist known for his critique of technology and modern society.

First published in German in 1956, the book appeared in English for the first time only in 2025. It is an unsettling work. Writing in the age of television, industrial automation and the atomic bomb, Anders worried that humanity was becoming more technologically capable without becoming better able to understand, much less control, what it had created.

Seven decades later, his observations seem remarkably prescient. Quoting a tale set in his fictional land of Molussia, Anders writes: “The less people have a voice, the more they are given to look at and see.”

Anders was describing a world in which images brought distant events into people’s living rooms while decisions shaping those events remained beyond their influence. The world appeared increasingly accessible, but accessibility was not agency. He warned that images could become “stultification-devices”: representations that reveal fragments of reality while obscuring the relationships needed to understand and judge them. One could watch history unfold without having much say in its direction.

Laine blockbuster: Ehlers emotional, Wheeler stoic but sincere

They were joined at the hip, a pair of charismatic and extremely talented young Winnipeg Jets wingers who formed an instant bond and never missed a chance to take a friendly shot at the other. And so Saturday's news that Patrik Laine had been traded to the Columbus Blue Jackets was an especially tough pill to swallow for Nikolaj Ehlers.

"He’s a guy that I’ve had a really good relationship with since my second year, since his first year. We were roommates together on the first road trip. We’ve been brothers since day one, so this is not very fun. It’s part of the business. It’s the way it goes," an emotional Ehlers said following his team's morning skate at Bell MTS Place.

They actually got a chance to say goodbye in person, as the injured Laine was down at the rink when the trigger was pulled.

“I found out like the other guys in there. Me and Patty are ones that we always joke around. You guys know that. We always chirp each other. So there’s a little bit of joking but we also know that we were roommates for three years. We’ve been really good friends for the last five years. So this is tough. This is not much fun. So he’s a guy that I’m for sure going to miss a lot," said Ehlers, who signed a seven-year contract extension with the Jets in 2017.

Blue wave in U.S. gives Democrats a choice

The win might not have been completely unexpected, but the size of it certainly was.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Republican party was handily dismantled by the Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, with the Democrats taking control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

States including Texas, South Carolina and Kansas elected Democrats, something that hasn’t happened in Kansas, for example, for 94 years. The Democrat who won a senate seat in Kansas, Adam Hamilton, notably campaigned on a moderate platform, promising to listen to all sides. There might be a lesson in that.

An unrepentant Trump said on social media that the loss was because he was not personally on the ballot, “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE.” He also said that he didn’t view the vote as a rejection of his policies: “We’ve had the greatest two years in the history of the presidency.”

How do you decolonize Canada’s museums? It’s a transformation that’s finally getting underway

The Canadian Museum of Human Rights is one of a number of museums across the country working to better their representation of traditionally marginalized groups.