B.C.'s provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, May 10, 2021.
Image Credit: FACEBOOK/Province of B.C.
May 10, 2021 - 4:07 PM
Demonstrating how fatal COVID-19 can be, B.C.’s top doctor offered insight into the 20 pandemic-related deaths in B.C. this weekend.
“Sadly, it is again over-represented by seniors and elders in our community, with 15 of the 20 people who died this past weekend, being over the age 70,” provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said, after announcing today, May 10, 1,759 new cases since Friday, 131 of which from Interior Health.
There were also two people in their 40s — one in Interior Health and one in Vancouver Coastal Health — and two people in their 50s.
Offering these numbers, Dr. Henry said, just helps demonstrate that nobody is immune to COVID-19 and that “this virus still has a tremendous, negative impact on our seniors and elders in our community across the province.”
While insight into the disease was how the meeting started, last week Dr. Henry and the province, in general, came under fire when granular data that had long been requested and was previously said not to be collected, was leaked to the Vancouver Sun.
Addressing that point, Dr. Henry explained the tack health officials have taken with releasing this information, has always been transparency but more data has been made available as time has marched on.
“This is surveillance data that we have from the very beginning shared with our team members,” she said.
There are more than 100 people who look at that data and from there it gets loaded to the BC CDC website.
“So all of that so-called leaked information is information that we've been sharing that's publicly available and more,” she said, adding that reports like the adverse events following immunization report and immunization data is on the BC CDC website.
“What is new, and what we what I said today, is we are going to post publicly — replacing the local health area maps —heat maps now that include for most areas, community health service areas.”
This information, she said, is available because higher case numbers over the last six weeks allow them to report on smaller geographic areas.
“Those maps will be posted on Wednesday. They were approved by me to be posted about a week and a half ago and we were trying to get the process so that we could have them be more interactive, but that has not been able to be pulled together quite yet, so we'll be posting Static Maps.”
She said, then, as the interactive system is made possible that will be posted as well.
“So I want to reassure people the first and primary role of the surveillance data that we collect is to make the best decisions from public health that we can, and that means sharing it with widely with public health professionals with researchers with scientists so that we best understand it,” she said.
“That's the primary purpose of the data and that's how we use it at a local level — on a one to one level with public health, at a provincial level to make provincial decisions about our program, and then we post as much as possible, publicly, so that everybody can see the data as well.”
As of today, there are now 6,140 active cases of COVID-19 around the province. There are 415 people in hospital, with 150 in ICU or critical care.
There were no new health care outbreaks to report today. To date 2,159,103 doses of all three COVID-19 vaccines have been delivered with 106,058 being second doses.
“I think that's a tremendous accomplishment,” Dr. Henry said.
“The focus of our COVID-19 response is to get all eligible people in British Columbia, vaccinated with their first dose and then fully vaccinated with their second dose as soon as we possibly can. To do this we need everyone to go on the Get Vaccinated website and register, whether you have received your first dose already or not. “
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