There are 43 new cases of COVID-19 in BC today, bringing the total number of cases in the province to 1,618. Of those cases, 680 are in the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority region.
There are currently 119 people with the virus in the province who are hospitalized and 52 of those people are in critical care.
At the federal correctional facility in Mission, the outbreak continues to worsen, as 63 people connected to the facility have now tested positive for the virus and six of those people are hospitalized.
In today’s provincial briefing, Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and Minister of Health Adrian Dix also provided an update on BC’s different pandemic models and discussed what the relaxation of public health measures could look like going forward.
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Like other jurisdictions, the virus has disproportionately affected older people in BC. The median ages for people who have tested positive for the virus, people with the virus who have been hospitalized and people who have died due to the virus are 54, 68 and 86, respectively.
Since the last provincial models were released on March 26, the evidence more clearly indicates that the epidemic curve is flattening in BC — and compared to other jurisdictions, the case rate per one million people has remained low. Henry attributed this in large part to the fact that the province introduced relatively stringent public health measures early and quickly, and that residents of the province have largely respected those measures.
Citing anonymized data from Google about people’s movements since the pandemic reached BC, Henry said that people are visiting retailers, grocery stores, pharmacies, transit stations and workplaces less compared to early March, indicating they are generally following public health measures.
Dix also presented some promising data on the province’s health care system, showing a plateauing of hospitalizations and the beginning of a plateau in the number of patients requiring critical care.
BC is so far well below the numbers of hospitalizations and critical care patients that were observed in Hubei province and Italy, so the province will no longer be including those scenarios in its health care capacity modelling, Dix said. Given these promising numbers, Dix added that elective surgeries may resume starting in mid-May.
Despite the promising signs about the trajectory of the pandemic in BC, however, both Henry and Dix cautioned that backing off current public health measures too quickly would be dangerous.
Henry presented a stark graph illustrating that the number of virus patients requiring critical care could steeply increase if the province were to withdraw all of its current stringent public health measures. Given that potential, she stressed that while some limits on non-essential travel and social contact may be able to be relaxed over the summer, it will be a while until BC can return to the way things were before the pandemic.
“I will caution, though, it is not going to be the same,” she said. “We are not going back to — right now — what we had in December.”
Dix echoed this cautionary note, emphasizing that the goal of the province is to protect people’s health while trying to minimize the negative consequences of public health measures.
“We must find a healthy way forward for the next 12 to 18 months — as Dr. Henry has said, a ‘healthy new normal’ — that can sustain us and that keeps us safe,” he said.
Stay up to date on UBC information related to COVID-19 by visiting ubyssey.ca/covid-19, the websites of the BCCDC, the Public Health Agency of Canada or the World Health Organization. The province has set up a dedicated COVID-19 phone line at 1-888-COVID19 or text at 1-888-268-4319. For updates on UBC’s response to COVID-19, visit ubc.ca/campus-notifications/
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