Dr. Bonnie Henry speaking today, April 1.
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October 15, 2020 - 3:50 PM
There were 142 new cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in B.C. today, Oct. 15, the provincial health officer said.
Only two of these were within the Interior Health region, raising the local total since the start of the pandemic to 587, while the provincial total is now 11,034. It’s unclear whether cases from the Fed Ex cluster in Kelowna were accounted for in today’s total.
While the case numbers reported today are par for the course, with weeks of triple-digit increases being announced, there was a new development challenging the narrative that B.C. children have yet to really be impacted by this disease.
Health teams have been monitoring for Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) associated with COVID-19, and today the first case was detected.
“We have been following this for some time,” Dr. Bonnie Henry said. “Initially we were only reporting confirmed cases. But in the summer we changed our monitoring to report cases that are under investigation to be aligned with both the Canadian and the WHO case definitions.”
To date, there have been 16 children who have been under investigation, she said, and none of them have had any positive laboratory tests that would indicate they were associated with COVID-19. That changed today.
“Our first confirmed case of MIS-C here in B.C. is a young child under age five, who has been diagnosed with MIS-C,” she said.
The child has fully recovered, Dr. Henry said, and is now at home.
MIS-C is similar to Kawasaki syndrome in children, but Dr. Henry said it’s a relatively new syndrome.
The cause of both MIS-C and Kawasaki syndrome is associated with inflammatory processes that happen in the body, particularly the blood vessels, after a person has been infected with a virus, Dr. Henry said.
“We first heard about it in April, with children out of Italy and New York City," she said.
At that time, a worldwide effort to quantify and understand it got underway and children and adolescents requiring hospitalization for a prolonged fever, gastrointestinal issues, a rash on both sides of the body, inflammation around the eyes, hands, mouth and feet were monitored.
As of today there are 1,494 active cases. 74 people are hospitalized — down 10 since yesterday—and 24 people are in ICU. There have been no new deaths.
To date, Vancouver Coastal Health has had 3,974 of the cases of COVID-19, Fraser Health has had 5,800, Vancouver Island has had 239, Northern Health has had 345 and 89 are outside of Canada.
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