A remote B.C. island community is anxious as it faces a two-week overnight closure of its local emergency room due to the ongoing medical staffing crisis across the province.
Island Health announced the closure of Alert Bay ER in the Cormorant Island Community Health Centre from 7 p.m. to 8 a.m. nightly, which started Tuesday and will last until Aug. 16.
Editors note: While Island Health withholds the locations of somewhere between 85% and 90% of the active cases on Vancouver Island, First Nation leaders appear to have been consistently notifying the broader community when there is a case among them.
Preliminary test results from COVID-19 antibody testing in Alert Bay are in, and they’re positive. Around 60 per cent of eligible people came to get tested, and just 3.7 per cent of them had the antibody present, indicating they had had COVID-19 and fought it off. Most of those were people known to have had COVID-19 and their close contacts.
