Eleven new confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been recorded in Island Health since Friday, but B.C.’s top doctor says the province is flattening the curve.
“We had been moving up and we’ve now, cautiously, started to turn that corner,” provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry told a news conference on Monday.
She urged people to keep their social circles small and local, particularly as Thanksgiving approaches, to continue the trend.
“We can’t start increasing risky contacts right now, because we know we’re heading into respiratory [illness] season,” she said.
Some of the new cases on the Island are travel related, and most of them are in different communities on the Island, Henry said. One case is related to a school exposure at Alberni District Secondary School.
A total of 358 new cases were recorded in B.C. over the weekend.
Although more than 100 new cases were recorded a day, Henry said the residents of British Columbia are doing what they need to do. Contact tracers are so far finding that many new cases are connected to one another and are not uncontrolled transmissions.
“We are flattening the curve,” Henry said, presenting a fall update of how the virus has affected the population.
In her previous update, the province’s COVID-19 curve was headed upward. “That increase has now slowed and it’s now turned and it’s coming down again.”
New cases of COVID-19 have been found throughout the province over the past 14 days, with the majority in the Vancouver Coastal and Fraser Health authorities.
Children under 18 remain underrepresented among new cases despite increased testing in response to schools reopening, Henry said.
“What we’re not seeing is schools amplifying transmission in the community,” she said, noting that seven in 1,000 tests associated with schools result in a diagnosis of COVID-19.
“Many children are requiring a test because they have symptoms, and this tells us that there are other things causing those symptoms that are circulating in our communities right now, including some of the cold viruses and regular things we see this time of year.”
The latest data shows 50 out of 1,942 schools across B.C. had recorded exposures to COVID-19 as of last Thursday and Henry said there have been 14 more exposures since then.
The data shows many exposures came early on, suggesting the infections started prior to the start of the school year.
B.C. has reported 9,739 cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, and 1,353 of those are active.
Sixty-six people are in hospital and four more people have died after contracting the illness.
No one under 40 has died of the virus in B.C., though some people in their 30s have found themselves in intensive care, Henry said. Most deaths have been of people who are elderly or living in seniors facilities.
There are 19 active COVID-19 outbreaks in the health care system, including one at the hospital in Delta.
The Fraser Health Authority Delta Hospital is not admitting new inpatients due to the outbreak , though the emergency department remains open and all scheduled surgeries will continue.
Henry noted the hospitalization rate is significantly lower than earlier in the pandemic, a change that reflects broader testing and also increases in cases among young people.
“We have a consistent, lower number of people in hospital now than we did earlier on in our first wave,” she said.
An update on reproductive rate — the number of infections stemming from each confirmed case — shows it is now below one, “where we want to be,” Henry said.
The health officer said her order to close nightclubs and banquet halls where there were large numbers of transmissions has “made a difference.”
