Another vaccine milestone in B.C., as the province has reached 80 per cent of eligible residents now receiving a first dose.

For that category of residents, who are aged 12 and older, 54.4 per cent are fully vaccinated with two doses.

B.C. has now administered 6,233,656 vaccine doses, which is 60,328 more doses than yesterday.

This comes as the province reported 76 new COVID-19 cases today, including 37 in Interior Health. The number for IH is significantly higher on a per-capita basis than all other health authorities; there were 27 new cases in Fraser Health, nine in Vancouver Coastal Health and three in Island Health.

There are now 692 active cases in the province, including 207 in IH. The Interior has 28 more active cases than on Monday.

Province-wide, 50 people are in hospital with COVID-19, and 12 of those people are in intensive case. Compared to Monday, there is one more person in hospital with the virus, while the number of ICU patients has not changed in four days.

While B.C.’s provincial state of emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic ended on July 1, after 16 months of being in that emergency, being out of one was short lived; today, the B.C. government declared a new provincial emergency because of wildfires burning in the Interior, including many in the Kamloops area. This came after multiple weeks of local leaders and officials in many parts of the Interior calling for that declaration.