BC health officials announce 521 new COVID-19 cases, eight more deaths

British Columbia health officials announced 521 new test-positive COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, bringing the total number of recorded cases in the province to 140,596.

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 77 new cases of COVID-19 in the Vancouver Coastal Health region, 335 new cases in the Fraser Health region, 18 in the Island Health region, 62 in the Interior Health region, and 29 in the Northern Health region.

There are 4,815 active cases of COVID-19 in the province, and of the active cases, 340 individuals are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, 118 of whom are in intensive care. The remaining people with COVID-19 are recovering at home in self-isolation.

There have been eight new COVID-19-related deaths, for a total of 1,658 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.1.3.5.1 (South Africa) variant and 878 cases of the P.1 (Brazil) variant.

To date, 2,623,907 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in BC, 135,246 of which are second doses.

A total of 133,985 people who tested positive for the virus have now recovered.