COVID-19 hospitalizations across B.C. jumped 35 per cent to 369 today, up from 273 last Thursday.
This is the highest count since June 2, when there were 421 such patients in B.C. hospitals. Of those now hospitalized with the disease, 36 are in intensive care units – four more than one week ago.
This is the first uptick in the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the province since May 12.
COVID-19 deaths continue to accumulate, with 24 people listed as having died while infected with COVID-19 in the week up until July 2. That is up from 17 such deaths in the previous week, but less than half of the 50 such deaths three weeks ago. The death total includes anyone who tested positive for COVID-19 within 30 days and then died. That calculation may include people who tested positive and then died in car accidents.
The B.C. government's process is to include those deaths initially, and then have its Vital Statistics Agency determine which deaths were not COVID-19-related, and remove them from the total.
As has been the case in each weekly update since the government shifted to only providing data once per week, the presumed COVID-19 death toll has risen by more than the number of new COVID-19 deaths. That is the opposite of what Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said would happen when she unveiled the new system in early April.
B.C.'s COVID-19 death toll rose by 41 in the week that ended July 2, despite the 24 new deaths being reported. When Glacier Media asked the B.C. Ministry of Health about the ongoing disparities in the weekly COVID-19 death totals and the overall death toll, an official said that the reason was that death totals were "tentative."
The province now considers 3,788 people to have died from COVID-19 in B.C. since the first death was announced on March 9, 2020 – a man in his 80s who lived at North Vancouver's Lynn Valley Care Centre.
The British Columbia Centre for Disease Control detected 765 new COVID-19 infections in the week that ended July 2. That is up by 145 from one week earlier, and it raises the number of known COVID-19 infections in B.C. to 375,357 since the first case was detected in late January 2020.
Data for new infections, however, has long been widely dismissed, and even Henry earlier this year called the information "not accurate." This is because in December she started telling people who were vaccinated and had mild symptoms to not get tested and to simply self-isolate. She said at the time that this was to increase testing capacity for those with more serious symptoms and those who are more vulnerable.
Testing is now only encouraged in cases where knowing the test result could change treatment recommendations.
The 12,104 COVID-19 tests conducted in B.C. in the week ended July 2 was down by 60 from one week earlier. Given that there were 765 new cases, the positive-test rate for the week was 6.32 per cent – the highest positive-test rate for a week since May 19.
