UPDATE: 2:15 p.m
This year’s respiratory virus season continues to put pressure on British Columbia’s health care system, but the prevalence of illness across the province has begun to decline from peaks seen in December.
Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix held a press conference Friday providing an update on the current situation in British Columbia regarding COVID-19, influenza, RSV and other respiratory illnesses.
While viruses such as flu usually peak at this time of year, Dr Henry said this respiratory illness season was “very unusual”, with high numbers of flu cases occurring in November and December in particular.
Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 cases in the province has remained “relatively stable” over the past three months. Although the province no longer has accurate data on testing for COVID-19, Dix said about 1,000 people in hospitals and other health care facilities continue to receive PCR tests each day.
Although this data will not capture the total number of cases in the community, combined with other data sources such as sewage monitoring data, Dr Henry said they were able to track trends in cases increasing or decreasing.
“Our data shows, from these various different sources, that influenza across all age groups has declined steadily from a peak where we saw around 27% positive tests at the end of November to around 5% now,” Dr Henry said.
“This was a very unusual year, so it’s very important to recognize that we can’t necessarily compare this year to previous flu seasons before the pandemic.”
She points to the lack of immunity that many people, especially children, have against flu and other respiratory viruses after several years of pandemic restrictions.
“There are several cohorts of children who have never been exposed to the flu because of all the restrictions we’ve had, especially the global travel restrictions,” she said. “There are people whose immune systems haven’t developed the protection they need.”
Dr. Henry noted that there have been no other flu-related deaths in children in recent weeks, other than the six tragic deaths that occurred in November and early December.
Hospitalizations due to COVID-19 rose slightly in December, but that number has been declining in recent weeks.
Dr. Henry also talked about Omicron’s latest COVID-19 variant, XBB.1.5. British Columbia surveillance data show that about 5-6% of new cases of COVID are this new subvariant. Although this new subvariant appears to be particularly transmissible, she said there is currently no evidence that it causes any more severe disease, and she says the latest bivalent vaccine appears to be effective against it.
“The defenses we’ve built up through immunization — combinations of vaccine immunity and infection-induced immunity — means we have strong defenses as a community in this province,” she said. “We are no longer at a point where we had to take emergency measures … COVID does not cause more severe illness than other respiratory infections.”
Health Minister Adrian Dix said by the end of the day Thursday, 10,116 people were hospitalized in British Columbia, which is 110 per cent of core beds, or 87 per cent of core beds plus capacity beds. But locally, hospitals remain stretched thin.
“There is a drop of about 100 [hospitalizations] from where we were last week, but it’s still dramatically high,” Dix said.
“We still have hospitals in British Columbia, specifically in Kelowna, Kamloops, Richmond and in other communities like Burnaby, that are above baseline and at capacity for additional beds, and our teams are doing an outstanding job managing this situation … this is a historically high number.”
ORIGINAL: 12:25 p.m
BC Health Minister Adrian Dix and Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry provide an update on the province’s respiratory illness season.
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