Fifty-nine more people have died in BC last week after testing positive for COVID-19, while the number of patients hospitalized with the disease appears to have dropped, according to the province’s latest reports on the pandemic.
As of Thursday, 540 people are hospitalized with the new coronavirus, including 49 in intensive care, according to the BC COVID-19 dashboard.
That’s a nine percent decrease in overall hospitalizations since last Thursday, when the province reported 596 people in hospital. The number of ICU patients was also down by about nine percent from 54 a week ago.
However, all numbers provided by the province are preliminary and it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions about trends. Under BC’s current system for reporting COVID-19 data, the numbers that are released for any given week will be retroactively adjusted and will often change significantly by the time the next reports are released.
The numbers released Thursday are part of a relatively recent shift in approach by BC health officials, both in the switch to weekly reports and in the way certain metrics are calculated.
Much of the province’s data is in a weekly report from the BC Center for Disease Controlwhich includes cases, hospital admissions and deaths, though all of those numbers are at least five days old.
Between May 8 and 14, the province reports 59 deaths. However, that number is being reported in a very different way than in the past, marking all deaths in anyone who tested positive for COVID-19 in the past 30 days, whether or not the disease has been confirmed as a contributing factor.
Not only does that mean it’s impossible to know how many of those 59 deaths were actually caused by COVID-19, it also means that people who died from the disease more than 30 days after testing positive are excluded from that data.
The number of deaths recorded between May 8 and May 14 is also likely to change significantly next week.
Last week, the BCCDC’s weekly report suggested that 59 people had died between May 1 and May 7. The most recent report says that 84 people died in that time period, an increase of 42 percent.
This week’s BCCDC report includes 1,645 new cases of COVID-19 reported between May 8 and May 14, based solely on reported laboratory results, for a total of 369,202 cases to date.
That’s a decline of about 17 percent from the 1,985 recorded the previous week, according to retroactively adjusted data from the province.
However, because PCR testing is now quite limited, weekly case counts are understood to underestimate the true number of people with COVID-19 in BC.
Serious outcomes are more common among the unvaccinated
Test positivity rates are down slightly, reaching 9.7% province-wide on May 14, compared to 10.6% the previous week. Positivity rates range from 16.4% on Vancouver Island to 7.1% in the Vancouver Coastal Health region, according to the panel.
Dr. Bonnie Henry, provincial health officer, has said anything above a five percent test positivity rate it is an indicator of a more worrying level of transmission.
A total of 334 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 between May 8 and May 14, according to preliminary figures from the BCCDC.
The BCCDC Regional Watch Board shows that over the past month, unvaccinated people were about twice as likely to end up in hospital with COVID-19 as those with three doses, three times more likely to require intensive care, and about 29 percent more likely to have To die.
Meanwhile, testing of wastewater at five different treatment plants representing 50 percent of BC’s population shows that, as of May 14, viral loads increased at three test sites and decreased at the remaining two. , according to BCCDC weekly status report.
Reference-www.cbc.ca