There was a total of nine new COVID-19 cases announced Thursday.
There were five official new cases and data will now start to include epi-linked cases, of which there were four.
‘Epi-linked’ means that public health investigations have shown that cases meet the case definition for COVID-19 but may not have been tested for a number of reasons.
Henry says the four epi-linked cases have all recovered and are not active.
It brings the provincial total to 2,632. There were no new deaths to announce today. There are also 26 people in hospital, six of whom are in intensive care.
New modelling on COVID-19 cases in BC paints a slightly better picture of where cases have been reported. In the Thompson, Cariboo and Shuswap regions, there have been 67 cases reported (see image below).
Before this, health officials had only stated the total for Interior Health, where there have been 195 cases. Provincial health officer, Doctor Bonnie Henry says this breakdown is by “health service delivery areas. Smaller areas than the health authority areas, but not as granular as I know many people would like. And we are working on how we could present this data in a way that gives you better representation of the impact of smaller communities around the province.”
Henry adds that the more specific data on where cases have happened show that COVID-19 has affected every community in BC. “Some of them more-so than others. And this is not a surprise for any of us.”
Today’s modelling presentation also looked at the potential curve as things reopen. It looked at what would happen if people begin to increase there circle of contacts to 50% of normal, 60% or normal, 70% of normal and 80% of normal (see image below).
Henry says we remain at around 30-40% of our pre-COVID contacts. “That’s what we want to stay at. We want to stay somewhere around 50- to 60% and we know that if we do that we are likely to have low numbers of cases over time and not to have any exponential growth in our trajectory here in BC.”
“If our contact rate increases to 70% we are likely to see a rapid growth and 80% we might see a rapid rebound in transmission in a very short period of time. So that is why we are taking our thoughtful and measured approach to our restart here in BC.”
Other information presented Thursday included a look at the age of people who have been effected and the severity of those cases (see image below).
In future reports, the province will present both new tested and epi-linked cases as one number.