COVID numbers rise in Interior

KELOWNA — Another outbreak of COVID-19 is underway at a care home in the Interior Health region.

With the outbreak at Kamloops Seniors Village, 13 of the 19 care homes where outbreaks have been declared are within Interior Health.

Seven of those facilities are in the Kelowna area — Cottonwoods, Brookhaven, Spring Valley, David Lloyd Jones, Sun Pointe Village, Village at Mill Creek, and Hawthorn Park.

A total of 655 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed across B.C. between Monday and Tuesday, including 242 infections in Interior Health.

Of the 6,045 active cases of COVID-19, 2,495, or 41%, are in Interior Health, even though the region accounts for just 15% of B.C.’s total population.

B.C.’s vaccination rate edged up to 84.3% on Tuesday from 84.2% on Monday.

In the past week, people who are not vaccinated at all accounted for 69.9% of all new COVID-19 cases. Those who had not received one or two shots accounted for 80.2% of all new cases.

In the past two weeks, 80.6% of those who’ve been hospitalized because of COVID-19 had not been vaccinated. Another 8% had received only one of the two necessary shots, and 11% were people who had been fully vaccinated.

“This is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said during a Tuesday briefing. “That’s where we are seeing this take off.”

Henry is encouraging everyone connected with children under 12 to get vaccinated as the school year begins next week.

Henry says about 600,000 kids in that age range are not eligible for vaccination in B.C., and rising cases in the United States are directly linked to low immunization rates in the community.

Cases among young children in the province have risen only slightly and very few of them have been hospitalized, but everyone from parents to school staff and bus drivers should be fully vaccinated.

Henry presented data showing that a 40year-old unvaccinated person has a 34 times higher risk of being hospitalized and an eight times higher risk of dying compared with someone of the same age who has been immunized.

The rate of transmission in the province has declined to the point that every infected person now infects one other person, but she says it could come down further with more people getting vaccinated and taking measures like wearing masks and physically distancing.

Interior Health will again have mobile immuniazation available Saturday at the Penticton Farmers Market of Main Street and Sunday at the Summerland Farmers and Crafters Market from 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. both days.