Worst of COVID’s impacts slowly declines in B.C.

The number of people made very sick by COVID-19 in B.C. has dropped slightly this week but continues to be very high. There are now 946 people with a positive COVID test in B.C. hospitals, according to a Province of B.C. news release issued today, Feb. 4. That’s down from a record...

Worst of COVID’s impacts slowly declines in B.C.

The number of people made very sick by COVID-19 in B.C. has dropped slightly this week but continues to be very high.

There are now 946 people with a positive COVID test in B.C. hospitals, according to a Province of B.C. news release issued today, Feb. 4.

That’s down from a record high of 1,048 on Monday as the number of daily cases has decreased every day this week.

There are 139 people in intensive care units, down from a high of 145 yesterday but up from 138 on Monday.

These counts can fluctuate up and down daily and are not a true representation of how many people are sick enough with COVID to be hospitalized. As many as 65% of people in hospital with a COVID diagnosis were not in there because of COVID but were tested after going to hospital for things like surgery, delivering a baby or being admitted to a mental health unit.

There were 1,799 positive cases of COVID recorded in B.C. in the last 24 hours, the lowest daily count since late August. That real number is estimated to be three to four times higher because many people infected with COVID since the Omicron variant began sweeping through the province, are not getting tested or take rapid tests that are not recorded in these figures.

There were 531 new cases recorded in the Interior Health region, which is 29.5% of the cases in B.C. for a region with 14% of the province’s population.

There were 551 cases recorded in Fraser Health, 294 in Vancouver Coastal, 232 on Vancouver Island and 191 in the Northern Health region.

There have been 19 more COVID deaths in the last 24 hours, none of them in Interior Health, bringing the pandemic total to 2,675.

There are 25,479 active cases in B.C.

The vaccination rate for people over the age of 12 is 92.8% with at least one dose and 90.2% with at least two doses while 48.1% have three doses.

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