The Province’s provincial health officer continues to ask British Columbians to be kind, to be calm, and to be safe.
Dr. Bonnie Henry provided the latest daily update on the number of COVID-19 cases Wednesday afternoon with Health Minister Adrian Dix.
“These are extraordinary times as we know and there have been many changes even overnight both around the world and here in British Columbia,” she said. “So today we have 45 new cases to report, so that brings our total of cases that have tested positive here in British Columbia up to 231.”
Henry said that includes 144 cases in Vancouver Coastal Health, 58 in the Fraser Health Region, 16 on Vancouver Island, 9 in the Interior Health Region, and four in Northern Health. 13 people are hospitalized, seven of whom are in intensive care.
Five people continue to be recovered.
“These are extraordinary times,” Henry repeated. “And we took a number of extraordinary measures in the last few days to try and do everything that we can to try and stop the transmission of this virus in our communities and flatten out the curve over the next 7 to 10 days. It’s a critical time, and it’s sometimes challenging to see what it is today when we seem like everything is fine but we do know that these virus is spreading in our community and the measures that we are requiring and asking of people are to try and prevent as much of that spread as we can and protect those people who are most likely to have a severe illness from this disease particularly our seniors and elders, people with comprised immune systems, people with underlying illnesses.”
With orders issued around schools, pubs, bars, and nightclubs, as well as restrictions in restaurants, around travel, and on mass gatherings, Henry stressed while these are temporary, they are extremely important right now.
“We’re dealing today with things that happened 10 days, 14 days ago and what we do today is going to help us in the next 10 days, 14 days, 2 weeks, or 3 weeks and it’s incredibly important that people start paying attention and use these measures now to mitigate what is happening in our communities now.”
Henry said legal orders are a measure of last resort and mostly they are asking people to take voluntary steps to help us in our community.
“While they are voluntary there is an expectation that we will do our civic duty to do our best around this to proactively protect our community and families,” she said.
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