B.C. health officials are reporting 481 new COVID-19 cases across the province this past weekend along with 12 more deaths.

There were 101 new cases in Interior Health, with another 285 cases in Fraser Health, 70 in Vancouver Coastal Health, 15 in Northern Health, and nine on Vancouver Island.

In all, there were 217 cases reported on Saturday, 131 on Sunday, and another 133 today.

With over 3.6 million vaccine doses administered in B.C., Deputy Public Health Officer, Dr. Reka Gustafson says British Columbians are doing very well on the COVID-19 vaccine front.

“74 per cent of adults have received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 72 per cent of all eligible British Columbians, so everyone over 12, has received their first dose of vaccine,” she said. “This includes 39 per cent of youth 12 to 17 who have received a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine.”

“The period between doses has been shortened to eight weeks, which means that many people will be able to book their second dose earlier than originally anticipated. We are now at Step 1 of the Restart Plan, and we are continuing to follow important indicators of the effect of COVID-19 on our communities.”

Gustafson says people who got the AstraZeneca vaccine for their first dose will be getting invites to book their second dose as of today. Last week, the province announced that people who got AstraZeneca will be able to opt for the Pfizer vaccine for their second dose, if they want a different vaccine.

“With the evidence that we have that shows mixing and matching of different types of vaccines, so the viral vector vaccine that AstraZeneca is with messenger-RNA vaccines like Pfizer or Moderna, is also now safe and effective and we know about the safety from data from the UK as well as places like Germany and Spain,” Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry said on Thusday.

All of the 12 deaths over the weekend were in the Lower Mainland taking the provincial death toll to 1,722 people.

Active cases were at 2,102 people with 199 people currently in hospital with COVID-19. Both those numbers were down from Friday’s update, though the number of people in ICU went up by four to 63 – 38 of whom require mechanical ventilators to breathe.

There are now 141,663 people who are considered to have recovered from COVID-19, about 97 per cent of the 145,530 cases in British Columbia.

B.C. on track for Phase 2 of restart next week

With the COVID situation in B.C. encouraging, the province is poised to move to Step 2 of its Restart Plan next Tuesday, June 15.

“We are on track. Our first dose immunizations are high and the important indicators of what’s actually happening with COVID-19 in our community [are moving in the right direction],” Gustafson added. “We are on a good path to get back to work, to school, to university, to seeing friends, to travelling.”

“If we keep going, we can get back to the things that sustain us, back to our communities, back to work, back to the meaningful relationships in our lives.”

Interior Health says just over 100 people in Kamloops were vaccinated against COVID-19 during a four-hour long pop-up clinic in the Cascades Casino parking lot yesterday.

As it stands, Gustafson says health officials are starting to plan a move away from managing COVID-19 as an emergency as the number of daily cases decline while vaccination rates increase. The hope, she noted, is that the virus will soon become “an expertly managed communicable disease that we rarely hear about” like other diseases.

“As cases continue to decline daily fluctuations, especially in cases, will be less and less meaningful,” she said. “Rather, seven-day averages and long-term trends are going to be better indicators of our progress from a public health perspective.”

“As long as we continue on this trajectory, we will be aiming to shift our approach from pandemic emergency response to sustainable public health management. It also means public health teams can return to some of the other equally important work to prevent overdoses, to prevent injuries, and to reduce health inequities in our population,” she added.