There are now 99,035 cases of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in B.C. after health officials announced 840 new cases Tuesday.
Of the new cases, 18 are epi-linked.
Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry reports that there have been 265 new cases of COVID-19 in the Vancouver Coastal Health region, 421 in the Fraser Health region, 39 in the Island Health region, 67 in the Interior Health region, 46 in the Northern Health Region and two new cases from people who reside outside of Canada.
There have been 320 new confirmed COVID-19 cases that are variants of concern in our province, for a total of 2,553 cases. Of the total cases, 313 are active and the remaining people have recovered. This includes 2,134 cases of the B.1.1.7 (U.K.) variant, 49 cases of the B.1.351 (South Africa) variant and 370 cases of the P.1 (Brazil) variant.
“To date, 724,193 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca-SII COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in B.C., 87,319 of which are second doses.," said Henry.
There have been no new COVID-19 related deaths, for a total of 1455 deaths in British Columbia.
Of the total COVID-19 cases, 312 individuals are hospitalized, 78 of whom are in intensive care. The remaining people with COVID-19 are recovering at home in self-isolation.
There are 7,062 active cases of COVID-19 in the province, with 11,164 people under public health monitoring as a result of identified exposure to known cases. A further 90,401 people who tested positive have recovered.
“We have seen the start of exponential growth of COVID-19 cases."
Henry noted that the Province is seeing an "exponential growth of COVID-19 cases and that people must take the necessary steps to "protect our communities" and push the curve down.
“We are asking people for your help – particularly over the next three weeks – to push our curve back down again. This means staying small, staying outside and staying with our same group of close contacts," she said, adding that people need to cease travel outside of their communities for leisure or vacation purposes.
“We understand that the upcoming important religious holidays are often a time when we would normally get together with others to celebrate. This year, we need to ensure we are celebrating safely, which means not travelling to other communities and postponing those family dinners until it is safe to be together indoors again. As this pandemic continues, we join faith congregations around the globe in celebrating these important holidays in a different way this year so we will all still be here when we can finally safely come together again," explained Henry.
“Today, on National Doctors’ Day, you can recognize the many doctors who have been on the front lines of our COVID-19 response by doing your part. You can do this by using all of your layers of protection and following the public health orders we have in place.
“Together, we can use this circuit breaker to slow the virus, protect more people with vaccines and allow us to continue to safely move forward.”
