COVID-19 update for Sept. 9: Here's the latest on coronavirus in B.C.

Health

COVID-19 update for Sept. 9: Here’s the latest on coronavirus in B.C.

Published

4 years ago

September 10, 2020

Harry Miller

Here’s your daily update with everything you need to know on the novel coronavirus situation in B.C. for Sept. 9, 2020.

We’ll provide summaries of what’s going on in B.C. right here so you can get the latest news at a glance. This page will be updated regularly throughout the day, with developments added as they happen.

Check back here for more updates throughout the day.

CASE SUMMARY

As of the latest figures given on Sept. 9:
• Total number of confirmed cases: 6,691 (1,378 active)
• New cases since Sept. 8: 100
• Hospitalized cases: 37
• Intensive care: 15
• COVID-19 related deaths: 213
• Cases under public health monitoring: 3,101
• Long-term care and assisted-living homes, and acute care facilities currently affected: 15

IN-DEPTH: COVID-19: Here are all the B.C. cases of the novel coronavirus

GUIDES AND LINKS

• COVID-19: Here’s everything you need to know about the novel coronavirus

• COVID-19: Have you been exposed? Here are all B.C. public health alerts

• COVID-19: Avoid these hand sanitizers that are recalled in Canada

• B.C. COVID-19 Symptom Self-Assessment Tool

• COVID-19: Here’s where to get tested in Metro Vancouver

LATEST UPDATES

3 p.m. – Two new health-care facility outbreaks reported in B.C. as active cases rise

There have been 100 new cases of COVID-19 reported in British Columbia over the past day and no deaths.

There are now 1,378 active cases of the disease in the province, with 37 of those cases being treated in hospital including 15 in intensive care. There have been 213 COVID-related deaths so far in B.C.

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said there were 3,101 people in self-isolation after being potentially exposed to the disease.

Henry said there had fresh outbreaks at two health-care facilities – the Royal Arch Masonic Home long-term care facility in Vancouver and the Milieu Children and Family Services Society community living facility in the Fraser Health region. This is the second outbreak at the Royal Arch Masonic home, with the first one leading to 12 deaths. There are 13 cases at the Milieu group home.

Sixteen of the 100 new cases reported on Wednesday were in health-care facilities, including 10 staff.

1:15 p.m. – B.C. plans to keep hospitals open, surgeries booked, during fall surge

B.C. is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to boost the health-care system this fall in an attempt to keep hospitals open for normal admissions, surgeries and ordinary influenza patients, while also handling a surge of COVID-19 cases.

Premier John Horgan unveiled the plan Wednesday, built upon an analysis of B.C.’s traditional winter influenza demands matched to a range of pandemic predictions.

In the worst-case scenario, the province says it has enough beds and ventilators to handle as many as double the COVID-19 cases seen during the peak periods from March to May, on top of regular hospital demands and flu cases.

The fall plan is underpinned by several changes to B.C.’s policies so far, including a shift from a province-wide health-care response used when the pandemic began in March, toward a regional approach that health officials said could be narrowed down to individual communities based on potential surges around the province.

8 a.m. – B.C. education Minister Rob Fleming answers your back-to-school questions

As students head back to school, we asked parents what questions they have for Education Minister Rob Fleming. In an exclusive interview, the minister responds.

Q: If B.C. is on the brink of an increase in COVID-19 infections, are you confident you can welcome kids back to school safely?

Fleming: Yes, we are because we have a well-thought-out plan, but one that changes a lot of things that we are used to in school. The new normal has a number of layers of protection. Provincial and federal COVID-19-specific funding helps pay for those things, whether it’s remote learning options for kids who are not returning to school or making in-class instruction safer by having hand-washing stations and hand sanitizer, staggered breaks, and keeping kids in smaller learning groups.

Click HERE to read the full interview.

8 a.m. – First Nation in Powell River, B.C., declares emergency after COVID-19 outbreak

A Powell River-area First Nation has issued a state of emergency after confirmation that four members have COVID-19 and several others are reporting symptoms of the virus.

A notice on the Tla’amin Nation website says residents have been ordered to shelter in place to slow the spread of the virus while health officials complete contact tracing.

The order affecting the community took effect late Tuesday afternoon and advised members they should stay where the are for the next 72 hours.

Access to the First Nation has also been restricted to a single entry point and parents are being urged to keep children out of school this week.

A letter from Vancouver Coastal Health says contact with the virus likely occurred during a wake on Sept. 3 or a funeral the following day in Powell River.

12 a.m. – Vancouver mayor calls special meeting to address needs of homeless during COVID

Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart is calling a special council meeting Friday to address proposals to deal with what he is calling emergency COVID-19 relief for the homeless problem impacting the city.

The mayor has put forward a motion with three options, including leasing or buying housing units including hotels, single-room occupancy residences and other available housing stock, establishing a temporary emergency relief encampment on vacant public or private lands and/or temporarily converting city-owned buildings into emergency housing or shelter.

12 a.m. – B.C. nightclubs and banquet halls shuttered and no late night booze sales

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has ordered all nightclubs and banquet halls closed, no late night booze sales and no loud party noise, as active cases of COVID-19 rise.

On Tuesday, Henry reported 429 cases of COVID-19 in B.C. over the last four days, and two deaths.

She said there were 1,386 active cases of COVID-19, of which 32 were being treated in hospital, including 12 in intensive care. There are 3,063 cases being monitored by health authorities after being exposed to the virus.

The two deaths had occurred at long-term care facilities in the Vancouver Coastal Health and Fraser Health regions. There are 14 active cases in health-care settings.

Henry said changes had to be made to combat the rising cases. People aged 20-29 make up the bulk of new cases among the age groups from zero to 100.

6 a.m. – Thousands of Canadian students return to schools as new COVID-19 cases emerge

Multiple provinces reported COVID-19 cases linked to schools just as thousands more students returned to class Tuesday, raising fears over what’s in store for a segment of the population largely sheltered from exposure over the past six months.

The fallout from earlier openings in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec cast a shadow over giddy reunions and hopes for a quick return to normal as more elementary, junior and high school students tested pandemic precautions that have touched nearly every aspect of school life, from the lunchroom to the playground.

Support Our Students Alberta, a non-partisan, non-profit public education advocacy group, released an online tracker for kindergarten to Grade 12 schools that suggested 22 schools have had cases since reopening a week ago.

Opposition NDP education critic Sarah Hoffman said there were at least 20 COVID-19 cases in schools, with 16 of those infections reported since Friday.

“This is a very disturbing trend just days into the school year,” Hoffman told a news conference.

Alberta Health Services said it was compiling a list of schools with confirmed cases. None of the schools have declared outbreaks and all remained open.

In Ottawa, officials told 193 students and seven staff to stay home after linking them to novel coronavirus infections.

THE CANADIAN PRESS

LOCAL RESOURCES

Here are a number of information and landing pages for COVID-19 from various health and government agencies.

• B.C. COVID-19 Symptom Self-Assessment Tool

• Vancouver Coastal Health – Information on Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)

• HealthLink B.C. – Coronavirus (COVID-19) information page

• B.C. Centre for Disease Control – Novel coronavirus (COVID-19)

• Government of Canada – Coronavirus disease (COVID-19): Outbreak update

• World Health Organization – Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak

–with files from The Canadian Press

Source:- The Crag and Canyon

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Health

Interior Health delivers nearly 800K immunization doses in 2023

Published

4 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Harry Miller

Interior Health says it delivered nearly 800,000 immunization doses last year — a number almost equal to the region’s population.

The released figure of 784,980 comes during National Immunization Awareness Week, which runs April 22-30.

The health care organization, which serves a large area of around 820,000, says it’s using the occasion to boost vaccine rates even though there may be post-pandemic vaccine fatigue.

“This is a very important initiative because it ensures that communicable diseases stay away from a region,” said Dr. Silvina Mema of Interior Health.

However, not all those doses were for COVID; the tally includes childhood immunizations plus immunizations for adults.

But IHA said immunizations are down from the height of the pandemic, when COVID vaccines were rolled out, though it seems to be on par with previous pre-pandemic years.

Interior Health says it’d like to see the overall immunization rate rise.

“Certainly there are some folks who have decided a vaccine is not for them. And they have their reasons,” said Jonathan Spence, manager of communicable disease prevention and control at Interior Health.

“I think there’s a lot of people who are hesitant, but that’s just simply because they have questions.

“And that’s actually part of what we’re celebrating this week is those public health nurses, those pharmacists, who can answer questions and answer questions with really good information around immunization.”

Mima echoed that sentiment.

“We take immunization very seriously. It’s a science-based program that has saved countless lives across the world and eliminated diseases that were before a threat and now we don’t see them anymore,” she said.

“So immunization is very important.”

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Health

Remnants of bird flu virus found in pasteurized milk, FDA says

Published

5 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Harry Miller

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that samples of pasteurized milk had tested positive for remnants of the bird flu virus that has infected dairy cows.

The agency stressed that the material is inactivated and that the findings “do not represent actual virus that may be a risk to consumers.” Officials added that they’re continuing to study the issue.

“To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the FDA said in a statement.

The announcement comes nearly a month after an avian influenza virus that has sickened millions of wild and commercial birds in recent years was detected in dairy cows in at least eight states. The Agriculture Department says 33 herds have been affected to date.

FDA officials didn’t indicate how many samples they tested or where they were obtained. The agency has been evaluating milk during processing and from grocery stores, officials said. Results of additional tests are expected in “the next few days to weeks.”

The PCR lab test the FDA used would have detected viral genetic material even after live virus was killed by pasteurization, or heat treatment, said Lee-Ann Jaykus, an emeritus food microbiologist and virologist at North Carolina State University

“There is no evidence to date that this is infectious virus and the FDA is following up on that,” Jaykus said.

Officials with the FDA and the USDA had previously said milk from affected cattle did not enter the commercial supply. Milk from sick animals is supposed to be diverted and destroyed. Federal regulations require milk that enters interstate commerce to be pasteurized.

Because the detection of the bird flu virus known as Type A H5N1 in dairy cattle is new and the situation is evolving, no studies on the effects of pasteurization on the virus have been completed, FDA officials said. But past research shows that pasteurization is “very likely” to inactivate heat-sensitive viruses like H5N1, the agency added.

Matt Herrick, a spokesman for the International Dairy Foods Association, said that time and temperature regulations for pasteurization ensure that the commercial U.S. milk supply is safe. Remnants of the virus “have zero impact on human health,” he wrote in an email.

Scientists confirmed the H5N1 virus in dairy cows in March after weeks of reports that cows in Texas were suffering from a mysterious malady. The cows were lethargic and saw a dramatic reduction in milk production. Although the H5N1 virus is lethal to commercial poultry, most infected cattle seem to recover within two weeks, experts said.

To date, two people in U.S. have been infected with bird flu. A Texas dairy worker who was in close contact with an infected cow recently developed a mild eye infection and has recovered. In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program caught it while killing infected birds at a Colorado poultry farm. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Health

Canada Falling Short in Adult Vaccination Rates – VOCM

Published

7 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Harry Miller

Canada is about where it should be when it comes to childhood vaccines, but for adult vaccinations it’s a different story.

Dr. Vivien Brown of Immunize Canada says the overall population should have rates of between 80 and 90 per cent for most vaccines, but that is not the case.

She says most children are in that range but not for adult vaccines and ultimately the most at-risk populations are not being reached.

She says the population is under immunized for conditions such as pneumonia, shingles, tetanus, and pertussis.

Brown wants people to talk with their family physician or pharmacist to see if they are up-to-date on vaccines, and to get caught up because many are “killer diseases.”

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