BC health officials announce 997 new COVID-19 cases, two more deaths

British Columbia health officials announced 997 new test-positive COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, bringing the total number of recorded cases in the province to 106,985.

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 356 new cases of COVID-19 in the Vancouver Coastal Health region, 465 new cases in the Fraser Health region, 67 in the Island Health region, 91 in the Interior Health region, and 18 in the Northern Health region.

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There are 8,728 active cases of COVID-19 in the province, with 14,602 people under public health monitoring as a result of identified exposure to known cases.

Of the active cases, 330 individuals are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, 105 of whom are in intensive care. The remaining people are recovering at home in self-isolation.

There have been two new COVID-19-related deaths, for a total of 1,491 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, 946,096 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca-SII COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in BC, 87,504 of which are second doses.

A total of 96,626 people who tested positive for the virus have now recovered.