534 B.C. residents in hospital and 102 in ICU with COVID-19

As the number of COVID-19 cases climbs in B.C., so does the number of people seriously ill with the disease.

There are now 534 B.C. residents in hospital who have COVID, 102 of whom are in intensive care units.

Given the fact that a large number of B.C. residents with COVID are either following the advice of health authorities and not getting tested, or are using rapid tests at home and not reporting to data collectors, the daily tally of new cases provided by the provincial government has lost much of its meaning.

“All along we knew that the daily numbers are not reflecting everybody who has COVID in our province,” provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said in her Dec. 29 news briefing. “That has been the case from the very beginning and at different periods of time, the actual true number can be varied by four or five times what we’re seeing in terms of PCR testing.”

Dr. Henry is advising people not to get tested if they have mild symptoms that they can manage at home.

“On average, there’s probably three to four times the number of people who truly have COVID than what is in our surveillance numbers on a daily basis,” Dr. Henry said.

The data released by the Province of B.C. today, Jan. 13, shows there were 2,554 new recorded cases of COVID in B.C. in the last 24 hours, of which 462 were in the Interior Health region.

More to the point, the 534 people in hospital with COVID is the highest level ever, passing the previous record of 515 set on April 28.

That number, too, is not totally accurate since it may include people who went to hospital for other reasons and tested positive before, for example, getting surgery.

It may also include some people who are in hospital but happen to be on a ward where there’s a COVID outbreak so they were tested and found to have COVID even though they may not have any symptoms.

READ MORE: B.C. health officials scrambling to determine how sick Omicron is making people

What is probably a more accurate count of the real impact of COVID on the population and the health-care system is the number of people so sick with COVID that they need intensive care.

Those 102 currently in intensive care units is still far shy of the peak on April 29 when there were 178 COVID patients in intensive care.

Whether that is the best way to demonstrate the impact COVID, and its Omicron variant, is having on B.C. is not totally clear since no one from the Ministry of Health was immediately available to speak with iNFOnews.

There were seven more deaths in the last 24 hours, none of which were in the Interior Health region, bringing the pandemic total to 2,462.

The percentage of B.C. residents 12 and over who have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine climbed slightly to 92.3%. The number with two doses remained the same at 89.5% while 29.2 % have three shots.

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