BC health officials announce 622 new COVID-19 cases, eight more deaths

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

British Columbia health officials announced 622 new test-positive COVID-19 cases on Thursday, bringing the total number of recorded cases in the province to 90,049.

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 184 new cases of COVID-19 in the Vancouver Coastal Health region, 317 new cases in the Fraser Health region, 35 in the Island Health region, 30 in the Interior Health region, 54 in the Northern Health region, and two new cases of people who reside outside of Canada.

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There are 4,941 active cases of COVID-19 in the province, with 9,620 people under active public health monitoring as a result of identified exposure to known cases.

Of the active cases, 286 individuals are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, 85 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 1,419 deaths in British Columbia.

There have been 136 new confirmed COVID-19 cases that are variants of concern in the province, for a total of 1,132 cases. Of the total cases, 143 are active and the remaining people have recovered. This includes 1,040 cases of the B.1.1.7 (UK) variant, 41 cases of the B.1.351 (South Africa) variant and 51 cases of the P.1 (Brazil) variant.

To date, 465,584 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca-SII COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in BC, 87,120 of which are second doses. Vaccine appointment bookings are open for people over 81 today and for people 80 and older tomorrow, along with Indigenous peoples over 65.

A total of 83,613 people who tested positive for the virus have now recovered.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story erroneously stated that there were 84 new cases in Vancouver Coastal Health, instead of 184. The article has since been updated.