It is poised to be a big week for B.C. Health Officials monitoring the impacts of the spread of COVID-19 in the province.
Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry says the novel coronavirus has up to a two week incubation period, but a number of people tend to develop symptoms in about five days.
“So what happened on the Easter weekend, for example, we’re going to start seeing if there’s impacts on our communities,” she said.
As the weather improves, Henry says people can’t let up in their efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19.
“We can’t lose sight of the fact that we continue to have people who are affected by this,” she added. “We continue to have outbreaks, we continue to have transmission, and so we are not at the point yet where we can let up our guard.”
Henry adds officials are urging people recovering at home to seek medical help if their condition worsens over time. And she says the fact that people are still dying from COVID-19 shows that the province is still battling the virus.
“The storm is still raging and you know, tragically we see that in the fact that people are still dying from this virus here in B.C.,” Henry said.
Health Minister Adrian Dix too is urging people to not let up in their efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19.
“There’s a case as you know in Alberta of one plant, which has [484] cases of COVID-19 in the community of High River, Alberta, which has I believe approximately 13,000 people, about the size of Dawson Creek,” he added. “This can come, and we need to be careful, and vigilant.”
As of Monday afternoon, there were seven confirmed COVID-19 cases in Interior Health and Northern Health ‘directly linked’ to an outbreak at the Kearl Lake oil sands project, north of Fort McMurray.
Dix says the province has released projections twice now, with more information to come as B.C. continues its fight against the virus.
“It is the responsibility of government sometimes to enforce, but its the responsibility of people to follow those, and to ensure that they are doing is safe, that is doesn’t lead to new spikes in new transmissions,” Dix added.
“We’ll be back with more modelling and more guidelines, proposals and protocols at the beginning of May.”
Henry noted that you scratch things like sports, conferences and concerts off your to-do list this summer as it is highly unlikely those activities will take place. The province has also changed its testing strategy, where anyone with COVID-19 symptoms in the province can now get a test.
