News briefs for Thursday, December 29, 2022

Manitoba’s pediatric intensive care unit is still treating more than double its pre-pandemic maximum number of young patients.

There were 21 patients in the pediatric intensive care unit as of midnight Thursday morning at Health Sciences Centre Children’s Hospital, Shared Health announced this afternoon. The unit normally has nine beds.

“A majority of pediatric patients in intensive care this morning were infants or toddlers that were experiencing severe respiratory symptoms associated with Influenza A and RSV bronchiolitis,” Shared Health stated.

There were 131 visits to the children’s ER Wednesday, and nearly half (63 patients) were either infected with influenza or were experiencing flu-like symptoms. Of those 131 patients, 74 were triaged as having mid- to high levels of sickness.

An 18-year-old man has been arrested following a chaotic incident involving a machete on a city bus Tuesday evening, Winnipeg police said Thursday.

On Wednesday, Terry Morton, 34, told the Free Press that the previous evening he had asked a group of people speaking loudly on a Winnipeg Transit bus to be quiet, which led to an assault and a fight with one suspect, before a second assailant pulled out a machete.

Morton, who was injured in the incident, said he disarmed the machete-wielding man and, with the help of a second passenger, got the man and the weapon off the bus near St. Anne’s Road and Fermor Avenue.

Police said Thursday they had identified a suspect nearby in the first 100 block of Alpine Road and arrested him, seizing a machete and sheath. The man, whose name has not been released, will be charged with assault with a weapon and possession of a weapon, police said. He was released on an undertaking.