This past week was the deadliest British Columbia has seen since the pandemic began. Dr Bonnie Henry reported 24 more deaths yesterday, which brings the total number of fatalities since last Friday to 105. The number of active cases in the province is close to 10,000.
However, there is also good news.
The Vaccine is coming
British Columbia’s first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were given to front line health care workers on Tuesday. A small shipment, possibly consisting of two trays of vaccine, will arrive on Vancouver Island next week.
Numbers falling on Vancouver Island
The number of active COVID cases is falling on Vancouver Island.
There were 19 active cases reported in North Vancouver Island yesterday. Only two weeks ago, there were 41.
Thanks to prompt action by the Klahoose First Nation’s emergency operation team, there are currently no known active cases on Cortes Island – but Island Health does not report the whereabouts of individual cases. So the public does not know when the virus actually reached Cortes and, to paraphrase Dr Charmaine Enns, Medical Health Officer for North Vancouver Island, it is best to assume it is still among us.
Testing
Dr Enns said, “Even on Vancouver Island, we only swab someone with symptoms but … right now, 99% of the people we swab do not have COVID. So, out of a hundred we swabbed yesterday, only one came back positive and [almost] invariably they were a close contact.”
When someone swabs positive, a nurse interviews them to determine the infectious period. They start at the point when their symptoms began.
“Even people who have underlying medical conditions … can invariably say this is when something changed. On this date, I lost my taste and smell … I’m always healthy, never have a problem, but on that day I had a bit of a fever and a dry cough,” continued Dr Enns.
“Once we know when the symptoms started, we go backwards two days to identify anyone who has been exposed to that person during what we call the presymptomatic period. Then we go forward ten days from when symptoms started. So that full twelve days is what we’re calling the period of communicability.”
“That [first] two days is a very precautionary capture of people, because we don’t have a lot of evidence that there is transmission in that period. It is our very precautionary approach to identify people who may have been exposed.”
“ … Once someone has gone ten days from when their symptoms started, we are very confident that they aren’t infectious anymore. In fact, the literature says probably by day 8, but we extend it by a couple of days to make sure we are going beyond that period of infectiousness. Occasionally some people test [positive] at the very end, or just past, and are infectious.”
“ … The test can pick up the virus for 100 days after somebody has been infectious because it is a very sensitive test that picks up genetic material of the virus. So a positive test does not mean you are infectious, it just means we have to investigate and define your infectious period. We have many people who are testing [positive] and are past their infectious [period]. That’s not a surprise anymore.”
Close contacts
She continued, “If you are sitting at the break room, across the table from each other, talking – maybe laughing, which increases the droplet transmission; you are sitting there for ten minutes, but you do that for two days in a row – that’s an exposure. That is a close contact because it is cumulative for more than 15 minutes during that period of infectiousness.”
Statistics for Vancouver Island
According to the British Columbia COVID 19 Dashboard, there are currently 81 active cases on Vancouver Island. Two people have died in the past two weeks. 7 are now in hospital and 4 are in critical care. 707 have recovered.
Links of Interest
- (part 1 of ZOOM conference) How Island Health responds to a COVID situation
- (part 2 of ZOOM conference) “There is a plan and it works”
- (part 3 of ZOOM conference) Island Health: Q & A about COVID issues
- (Cortes Currents) articles about or mentioning the outbreak on Cortes
- (Cortes Currents) Testing gaps result in the virus sometimes going undetected
- (Cortes Currents) How COVID impacted teen afterschool programming on Cortes
- (Cortes Currents) Foods, lifestyle and supplements to help build up your resistance
- (Cortes Currents) COVID updates
- (Island Health) COVID 19 Daily Dashboard
- (BC Centre for Disease Control) BC COVID 19 data
- The British Columbia COVID 19 Dashboard
Top photo credit: Syringes with bottle with COVID 19 vaccine on white background by Marco Verch, Professional Photographer, via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)
Funded by a grant from the Community Radio Fund of Canada and the Government of Canada’s Local Journalism Initiative.