B.C. health officials on March 3 announced that the province has identified a ninth case of COVID-19 – a man who is in his 50s and is self-isolating at his home in the Fraser Health region. He had visited Iran, where there is a concentration of infections.
That virus is spreading around the world and has infected 92,315 people and caused 3,131 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering.
The province’s health officer Bonnie Henry said that she expected that there would be more cases.
No one has yet died in B.C. from the disease. South of the border in Washington State, however, there are so far nine deaths and 27 cases.
"I still believe it's very safe for us to travel back and forth across from Washington into Canada," she said. "Canadian Border Services Agency is doing screening at our land borders as well [as airports]. I have been watching obviously very closely and in contact with my colleagues in Washington State, and it is still very limited and they are doing extensive investigations to understand where the transmission patterns are in the U.S."
Henry said travel bans that forbid air travel to regions where there are outbreaks of the virus are not an effective way to guard against the disease, and she pointed at how the U.S. had put in place a ban on foreigners entering the country if they had been to mainland China within the previous two weeks, and the U.S. still found itself in a situation where its citizens started to become infected.
Instead, Henry urged people to take extra precautions such as not shaking hands with people, or kissing them in greetings. She reiterated the oft-cited prevention tactic of washing hands, although she added an analogy to underscore how rigorous that hand washing should be.
"Wash your hands like you've been chopping jalapeños and you need to change your contacts," she said.
B.C.'s first case of the coronavirus was reported on January 28, after having been detected a day earlier. The disease is thought to have started spreading in late December in a live-animal food market in Wuhan, China. More than 86.8% of the cases reported globally have been in mainland China although the number of new cases has started to grow faster outside of China than inside that country.
Countries such as South Korea, Iran and Italy are also places where large outbreaks have occurred.
