Thursday saw the lowest one-day count for new COVID-19 cases in Interior Health in recent memory, despite a spike in new cases across the province.

Health officials have reported 617 new cases and four new deaths today in B.C., and in Interior Health there were 17 cases and two deaths.

The new cases in IH make up less than three per cent of new cases province-wide, and the 692 active cases in the Interior are 16 per cent of the 4,348 active cases across B.C.

Elsewhere today, there were 342 new cases in Fraser Health, 146 in Vancouver Coastal Health, 92 in Northern Health and 19 in Island Health.

There are now 224 people in hospital with COVID-19 and 60 people in intensive care. Within IH, there are 29 people in hospital with the virus and nine people in ICU.

Meanwhile, Interior Health says for a fifth-straight day, there has been no growth at four healthcare facilities in Kamloops with a COVID-19 outbreak.

Those are Royal Inland Hospital, Brocklehurst Gemstone Care Centre, Westsyde Care Residences and Highridge Home and Singh House.

Chief medical health officer, Dr. Albert de Villiers, also has reported one new COVID-19 variant case, saying there are now two cases in IH with the U.K. variant and one with the Nigerian variant. Before today there was just one of each.

De Villiers says all three of those variant cases were picked up by people travelling out of country.

“So we are working with the province and sending in samples where they can do full genome sequencing on a regular basis, to make sure we can actually identify these cases very quickly. So at this stage it’s not spreading across the Interior Health region, so no need to be concerned at this point.”

As of Tuesday, there were 60 COVID-19 cases with a variant of concern reported in B.C. Another update will be released Friday afternoon.

Also, as of today, more than 180,600 COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered, which is an increase of about 9,000 doses in the past two days.