BC health officials announce 1,001 new COVID-19 cases, four more deaths

British Columbia health officials announced 1,001 new test-positive COVID-19 cases on Friday, bringing the total number of recorded cases in the province to 123,758.

In a joint written statement, Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix said that broken down by health region, this equates to 215 new cases of COVID-19 in the Vancouver Coastal Health region, 626 new cases in the Fraser Health region, 26 in the Island Health region, 93 in the Interior Health region, 39 in the Northern Health region, and two new cases of people who reside outside of Canada.

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There are 8,842 active cases of COVID-19 in the province, with 12,608 people under public health monitoring as a result of identified exposure to known cases.

Of the active cases, 486 individuals are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, 160 of whom are in intensive care. The remaining people are recovering at home in self-isolation.

There have been four new COVID-19 related deaths, for a total of 1,554 deaths in British Columbia.

There are currently 3,766 confirmed COVID-19 cases that are variants of concern in the province. Additional whole genome sequencing has not been completed since the last report. Of the total cases, 266 are active and the remaining people have recovered. This includes 2,837 cases of the B.1.1.7 (UK) variant, 51 cases of the B.1.351 (South Africa) variant and 878 cases of the P.1 (Brazil) variant.

To date, 1,542,066 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, 88,663 of which are second doses.

A total of 113,139 people who tested positive for the virus have now recovered, as well.