New Brunswick reported five COVID-19 deaths in its latest weekly epidemiology update.
That’s one up from the previous report.
There were also 20 new hospital admissions for COVID-19 complications in the seven-day period ending Aug. 13, a slight increase of two from the previous week.
There are now 27 active hospitalizations, with four in ICU. The highest proportion of those hospitalized are individuals aged 70-89.
The province also said, “Individuals that are unprotected by vaccine continue to have the highest rate of hospitalization for COVID-19 and ICU admissions.”
Public health also said it recorded 675 new PCR-confirmed cases of COVID-19, down from the previous week.
In addition, about 86 per cent of COVID-19 samples that were randomly selected for analyses turned out to be the BA.5 variant, a subvariant of Omicron.
That subvariant is now the dominant version of the virus globally. The percentage has been slowly increasing over the past few weeks, and is up by three per cent compared to last week.
No samples turned out to be the original BA. 1 variant of Omicron.