New COVID-19 case numbers in BC drop below 500

Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry (Gov BC/Flickr)

British Columbia health officials announced 494 new test-positive COVID-19 cases on Friday, bringing the total number of recorded cases in the province to 138,304.

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 140 new cases of COVID-19 in the Vancouver Coastal Health region, 288 new cases in the Fraser Health region, eight in the Island Health region, 33 in the Interior Health region, and 25 in the Northern Health region.

There are 5,548 active cases of COVID-19 in the province, and of the active cases, 387 individuals are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, 141 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 1,634 deaths in British Columbia.

To date, 2,393,265 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca-SII COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in BC, 124,880 of which are second doses.

A total of 130,953 people who tested positive for the virus have now recovered.