Dr. Bonnie Henry.

Image Credit: FACEBOOK/BC Government

The Interior Health region has suffered its first COVID-19 fatality, Dr. Bonnie Henry said today, April 15, during the provincial update.

Henry said a man in his 60s, who was recovering from the disease at home, died.

The province, she said, was notified of the death yesterday, and the man had mostly been at home while he suffered from the disease but had gone into the hospital just prior to his death.

She couldn't confirm the location of the death but in recent days an obituary for Kelowna resident Dennis Rau, 69, was posted, stating he died April 9 from complications of COVID-19. When asked yesterday, Interior Health directed media queries to a statistics page from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control that said there had been no deaths in Interior Health, to date.

The local death was one of three British Columbians whose deaths were recorded in the last 24 hours, raising the provincial death toll to 75.

Henry said there were 44 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours amounting to a total of 1,561 people testing positive. There were three new positive diagnoses at the Bylands in West Kelowna, raising the total to 26.

Of those who have tested positive, 955 are considered to be fully recovered.

There are 131 people in the hospital, Henry said, including 59 in intensive care or critical care units. Interior Health still has 11 hospitalized cases.

There have been 146 confirmed cases in Interior Health, 92 on Vancouver Island, up three from Tuesday. There are 670 cases in Vancouver Coastal Health, 623 in Fraser Health and 30 in Northern Health.

While the numbers in recent days reflect some success in bending the curve back, Henry said that B.C. is far from being in the clear, and she described it as just part way through the beginning. She sees no changes to what we are doing for the next three weeks, at least.

"We are not yet through this pandemic, in B.C. or Canada or globally and there's a lot of work that has to be done to make sure we get through this safely," she said.

In B.C., we will still have safe distance measures in place for some time, she said, while looking at things like restarting the economy.

In addition to continuing on with safe social distancing measures, it’s time to focus on being kind and supporting one another, she said.

“We are in this together,” Henry said.

“We are not at the point yet where we can let up and I know that is very challenging for people. We’re hearing anecdotes about people getting frustrated and angry, this is a manifestation of fear and anxiety.”

It’s a byproduct, she said, of not knowing what will happen with jobs and with family and being affected by not getting to see loved ones.

She recommended that people respond to these outbursts of anger with kindness.

“Make sure we can support each other in the coming weeks and months. What we do today and every day matters. We are all making a difference and we are getting thorough this together… We need to be kind and we need to be calm and to help each other and stay safe."

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