Nova Scotia reports 9 deaths in latest COVID-19 update

Nova Scotia reported nine COVID-19 deaths in its weekly update on Thursday.

All of the deaths are from previous reporting periods, meaning theymost likely occurred within the last weeks or months.

Since March 2020, there have been 841 deaths related to the virus.

The province also reported 181 new cases confirmed by PCR tests with a daily average of 26. This is down from the previous week when there were 241lab-confirmed cases.

Nova Scotia Healthreported 106people in hospital with COVID-19 on Thursday. This is adecreasefrom the previous reporting period when there were129 people in hospital with COVID-19.

Of those 106 people:

• 13were in hospital for COVID-19 (including two peoplein ICU).
• 63 were in hospital for something else but have COVID-19.
• 30 patients contracted COVID-19 after admission.

Nova Scotia Health said there were 32 employees off work Wednesday due tobeing diagnosed with COVID-19, awaiting test resultsor being exposed to a member of their household who tested positive.

The IWK Health Centre said 26 of its staff were off work because of COVID or isolating from COVID. Hospitalizations at the IWK are below five.