Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry
Image Credit: Flickr/Province of B.C.
September 21, 2020 - 3:58 PM
Quebec announced it was in its second wave of COVID-19 this week, but despite another weekend of triple-digit case increases B.C.’s top doctor is loath to call it that.
It's more of a “mogul” Dr. Bonnie Henry said today, Sept. 21, after announcing 366 new cases of COVID-19 in B.C. since Friday, and four more deaths. The total number of COVID-19 cases is now 8,208 while the death toll now sits at 227.
“We’ve been looking at it slightly differently here (in B.C.) from the very beginning,” Dr. Henry said.
“Each of us is dealing with our own pandemic … and the key things that we are looking at here are around unlinked cases. And that's one thing where we have quite a difference between Ontario and Quebec.”
Dr. Henry said 80 per cent of cases in B.C. are connected to another case, cluster or outbreak and public health officers can still track down their contacts in one to two days.
“Those are things that that I've been watching very carefully,” she said.
She added they’re also looking at hospitalizations and ICU need, which is also below the highs of last spring.
“We definitely are seeing a resurgence, and the important thing is can we manage this can we keep it into under control without having that rapidly growing exponential growth,” she said. “And so far we've been able to do that but we all need to continue doing our part to keep it that way.”
One of the things that have changed in recent days, however, is the resumption of school.
Dr. Henry said they had several exposures in several different school settings.
“They are mostly very low risk, which is what we would expect,” she said.
“We have had no clusters, no transmission events in schools and no outbreaks. At this point, and we must continue to stress the layers of prevention that we have in place in our school system to make sure that children and teachers and staff can get back to school safely.”
Of all the new cases, 16 are in the Interior Health region raising the total to 508.
The Vancouver Coastal health region has had 2,945 cases, the Fraser Health region has 4,211, the Vancouver Island Health region is up to 203, 255 people in the Northern Health region and 86 people who were born, or who reside outside of Canada.
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