B.C. COVID cases are ‘slowly creeping up’ heading into fall: Dr. Bonnie Henry
COVID-19 infections are once again on the rise, with the number of infections in B.C. increasing more than threefold in the past month.
On Sept. 7, a total of 241 people with COVID-19 were in hospital across the province, with weekly admissions spiking from 95 in the week ending Aug. 12 to 136 two weeks later, before dipping to 119 new cases.
The number of new cases jumped to 447 in the week of Aug. 27, from 133 in the week of Aug. 6. The positivity rate — the percentage of all laboratory coronavirus tests that tested positive — increased from 8.5 per cent to nearly 18 per cent in the same period.
“It’s slowly creeping up,” B.C.’s provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, said on Thursday. “We’re starting to see things across the continent and Europe slowly starting to increase in terms of the number of cases.”
The figures remain well below previous peaks, said Henry, and lower than this time last year when B.C. had an early surge of COVID in August combined with an upswing in influenza and respiratory syncytial virus cases in September.
