New COVID-19 cases in Burnaby have taken a dramatic turn, according to the latest data from the BC Centre for Disease Control, with the city seeing the highest number of cases in a week since a seven-day period in December 2020.
In an update posted to the BCCDC website, Burnaby logged 197 new coronavirus cases from Feb. 7 to 13 – a dramatic spike from the period of Jan. 31 to Feb. 6, in which Burnaby had 121 new coronavirus cases. From Jan. 24 to 30, Burnaby had 124 new coronavirus cases.
Those two weeks were both down from Jan. 17 to 23, when Burnaby had 155 new coronavirus cases.
Outbreaks remains at Burnaby Hospital and the long-term care home George Derby Centre, which has seen more than 100 cases, and 36 deaths, during the length of its outbreak, which started on Nov. 13, 2020.
A new COVID-19 case has also been reported at the T&T store Metropolis at Metrotown.
From Jan. 10 to 16, there were 111 new coronavirus cases in Burnaby.
There were 152 new cases from Jan. 3-9. There were 169 cases from Dec. 27-Jan. 3 – which was a large drop from Dec. 20 to 26, when there were 214 new cases in Burnaby – a drop from the 287 new cases from Dec. 13-19 and 341 cases from Dec. 6-12 – the worst week for the city.
While cases dropped as December went on, the month was also Burnaby’s worst with 1,139 new cases, compared with the 1,081 new cases during November. Burnaby had just 287 new cases in all of October and 238 cases in September.
According to the BCCDC, Burnaby had 3,077 COVID-19 cases between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2020.
Three British Columbians lost their lives to COVID-19 between Tuesday and Wednesday, and as tragic as that is, it is the lowest number of new deaths reported for a one-day period since November 19. Since the province's first reported COVID-19 death last March, health officials have attributed 1,317 deaths to the virus.
The province does not always break out the number of deaths on weekend days, so it is possible that there were fewer deaths on a recent weekend. Regardless, the low total of new deaths is a positive sign that the province is turning a corner on the most serious metric to watch during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mass vaccinations at seniors' homes appear to have been successful at dampening the death toll in those facilities, as well as helping extinguish new outbreaks.
"There have been no new health-care facility outbreaks," provincial health officer Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix said in a joint statement.
New infections continue, however, at a rate much higher than Henry said that she would like.
Health officials detected 427 new COVID-19 infections in the past 24 hours. That's a significantly higher total than in the past couple of days, but well in the range seen so far this month.
Of the 74,710 infections detected so far during the pandemic, 69,167 people, or more than 92.5%, are considered to have recovered, meaning that they have tested negative twice for the virus.
The number of active infections has been hovering above 4,000 for the past week, and is now 4,150. The vast majority of those people have been told to self-isolate, although 232 are sick enough to be in hospitals, and 63 of those are in intensive care units.
- With files from Glen Korstrom, Business in Vancouver
