Photo: BC Gov Flickr
“The pandemic is waning,” Prime Minister Horgan said on May 27.
Several metrics show that while the COVID-19 pandemic in BC has been declining until May, the disease continues to spread in the community.
The 421 people now hospitalized with COVID-19 are the lowest total since April 14, when there were 364 people. Of these, 41 are ill enough to be in intensive care units (ICUs), the lowest number since May 5, when there were 39 patients.
While the drops are good news, today a year ago there were 246 patients with COVID-19 in BC hospitals. Back then, data analysts had a more limited way of counting COVID-19 than they do today. Current counts include anyone who was admitted to the hospital for another reason and incidentally tested positive for COVID-19. It also includes those patients who habitually reside in other provinces and people who have spent more than 10 days after experiencing the first symptoms.
Politicians have recently taken to minimizing the severity of the pandemic in the province.
“The pandemic is waning,” Horgan told a May 27 conference of Western prime ministers. “Becoming endemic”.
However, the BC Center for Disease Control estimated that during the week ending May 28, 44 people in BC had died while infected with COVID-19. That’s two more than the week ended May 21, and includes all people who tested positive for COVID-19 within 30 days and then died. This calculation may include people who tested positive and then died in traffic accidents.
The BC government’s process is to include these deaths initially and then have their Life Statistics Agency determine which deaths were unrelated to COVID-19 and remove them from the total.
As has been the case in every weekly update since the government went on to provide data only once a week, the number of deaths from COVID-19 is supposed to have increased more than the number of new deaths from COVID-19. This is contrary to what the provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, said when she introduced the new system in early April. The number of deaths from COVID-19 in BC increased by 58 in the week ending May 28, although 44 new deaths were recorded.
The BC CDC detected 1,163 new COVID-19 infections in the week ending May 28th. This is the lowest weekly total since the province passed the weekly updates on April 7th.
Data on new infections, however, have long since been widely dismissed, and even Henry earlier in the year called the information “inaccurate.” This is because in December he started telling people that they were vaccinated and had mild symptoms that they should not be tested and that they should simply be isolated. He said at the time that this was to increase the test capacity for those with more severe symptoms and those who are more vulnerable.
Another good news is that the positive test rate has also dropped to the lowest level since the weekly updates were released. Considering that the week ended May 28, the CDC in BC conducted 20,182 tests and found 1,163 new infections, which reaches a rate of 5.76 percent positive tests.