Dr. Bonnie Henry
Image Credit: FACEBOOK/BC Government
June 04, 2020 - 3:27 PM
COVID-19 has not reared its ugly head despite the softening of lockdown restrictions in B.C., Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said today, June 4.
That’s due in part to the fact that people are still practicing good safe distancing and cleanliness.
“So far we’re doing OK,” Henry said during a statistical update of the pandemic today, June 4. “If this continues over the next two weeks or week-and-a-half, really we’ll be in good shape to move on to Phase 3 (of easing restrictions).”
One graph showed how people have not yet returned to normal in most sectors.
This graph shows progress towards normal levels of activity in B.C.
Image Credit: Submitted/B.C. Centre for Disease Control
“We can see that people are returning slowly to retail, work places, transit, somewhere near our baseline of grocery stores and pharmacies and a big increase in parks – it’s probably got something to do with parks re-opening,” Dr. Henry said.
She said that children are at very low risk of getting COVID-19 or spreading it, even with schools reopening.
“We can prevent renewed growth by making sure that people who are sick or who have any symptoms stay away from those environments,” Henry said.
Children under 10 make up 10 per cent of B.C.’s population but only one per cent of cases. Of those who did get the disease, two were hospitalized. Only one teen was hospitalized and no one under the age of 40 has died.
This shows hospitalization and death by age.
Image Credit: Submitted/B.C. Centre for Disease Control
Henry provided data on where the infections originated.
While early cases mostly came from China they did not spread far into the community.
The biggest impact came from a huge dental conference in the Lower Mainland in March as well as from Washington state and people returning from other countries.
But that research is based on about 700 of 2,600 cases of COVID-19 in B.C. so she could not break down where the majority of the infections came from. Work is continuing in that area.
Dr. Bonnie Henry says this is a complicated graph but it gives an indication of where the B.C. cases originated.
Image Credit: Submitted/B.C. Centre for Disease Control
Early in the outbreak, for every person who tested positive, an average of 11 people were contacted to see if they were infected and two per cent of those also became infected.
After safe distancing restrictions were introduced on March 15, the average number of contacts dropped to less than four but 7.4 per cent of those contacts became infected.
That meant that people were not out in the community as much but were infecting those closest to them.
This shows contact tracing before and after safe distancings and other restrictions were put in place on March 15.
Image Credit: Submitted/B.C. Centre for Disease Control
While the number of cases per day has declined, there are still clusters and outbreaks. There are also plenty of cases in Washington state, Alberta and Alaska so, Dr. Henry said, British Columbians cannot go back to normal just yet.
Dr. Henry later modified her mantra which was always “Be kind. Be calm. Be safe.”
“My new mantra is to minimize, manage and modify,” Henry said. “We want to minimize the number of new cases. That means the things that we are doing and have in place now. We need to actively and very quickly and nimbly manage cases and clusters with rapid contact tracing. And we need to modify our measures as needed."
She said there were nine new cases in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 2,632 in B.C. That includes 1,334 in Fraser Health, 909 in Vancouver Health, 195 in Interior Health, 130 on Vancouver Island and 64 in the north.
There have been no new cases in the Interior in the last week.
There were no new deaths and there are only 26 people in hospital, including six in intensive care. There have been 2,265 people who have fully recovered from the disease.
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