VICTORIA, B.C. – The Northern Health Region recorded 71 new cases on Friday, bringing the active case count to 374.
Out of 18 people in hospital, 15 are in Critical Care.
There were no COVID-19 related deaths reported in the region. A total of 85 COVID-19 related deaths have occurred since last spring.
There have been 3,213 recoveries out of 3,681 total cases in the Northern Health Region.
Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry announced British Columbia’s current public health restrictions, including those prohibiting gatherings of any size, will continue indefinitely.
“We are seeing some encouraging signs here in B.C.,” Henry said.
“We need to buy time to understand whether these variants of concern are going to affect transmission in our community, and we need to buy time to get our immunization program back up to speed.”
While Henry did not give specifics, she did say there is a possibility of returning to some activities by the end of the month, including youth sport, gatherings, and social interactions.
In order to remove these restrictions, Dr. Henry said she will continue to monitor daily case rates, outbreaks, locations of clusters, presence of variants, and progress on the vaccine rollout.
Across the province, 471 new COVID-19 cases were reported Friday, bringing the active case count in B.C. to 4,423.
There are a total of 253 people in hospital, 70 of those are in Critical Care.
There were 6 COVID-19 related deaths recorded today. Since last spring, 1,246 people have died of COVID-19 in the province.
There have been a total of 69,716 COVID-19 cases in British Columbia, and 62,567 have recovered.
