At least 37 infected with COVID-19 in Chilliwack shelter outbreak
A homeless shelter in Chilliwack is battling COVID-19 among clients and staff as outbreaks were declared at six long-term care facilities on Monday.
Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said the community outbreak at the Portal Shelter at 46293 Yale Rd. had so far affected 25 clients and 12 staff. No one has died.
“There's been one new community outbreak declared at the Portal Shelter in the Fraser Health region, and the one that we had been managing at Cove Shelter (in Surrey) has now been contained and declared over,” Henry said as she reported 45 deaths and 2,211 cases of COVID-19 between Dec. 31 and Jan. 4.
She said that during the same time there were health care outbreaks at the Braddan Private Hospital ( Vancouver); Creekside Landing ( Vernon); Kin Village (Delta); the Madison Care Centre; Royal City Manor (Coquitlam); and the Williams Lake Seniors Village.
Most of the 45 people who died over the past four days were in long-term care facilities, Henry said. Two-thirds of B.C.'s 946 total deaths are in care homes, with the province's worst outbreak still underway at the Little Mountain Place in east Vancouver where at least 38 residents have died.
There are now 52 active outbreaks in long-term care facilities and eight in hospitals.
Henry said that more than half (1,301) of the cases reported in the last four days were in Fraser Health.
There are 6,823 active cases of the disease in B.C., with that number continuing to fall. Of those cases, 351 are being treated in hospital, with 76 in intensive care. There are 8,785 people in self-isolation in the province after being exposed to the virus.
Health Minister Adrian Dix said there were 381 intensive-care beds available in the province, and 3,862 general-care beds. This includes surge beds available in an emergency.
Henry described the Little Mountain Place outbreak as “incredibly lethal.”
“There is no one simple thing as well about why it spread so rapidly in some places versus others,” she said. “I know Vancouver Coastal has been on site daily and bringing in staff to support people in Little Mountain and that it has been very challenging for them.”
Vancouver Coastal Health is providing no public details about the outbreak. During the first six months of the pandemic the Ministry of Health provided a daily update of active COVID-19 outbreaks in long-term care facilities, including the number of people who had died and the numbers of infected among residents and staff. This has stopped, with the ministry claiming it doesn't have the resources to continue to provide outbreak details.
Henry said that as long-term care outbreaks worsened, “the actual person power to get that information every day and collate it was taking hours and hours and hours of epidemiology time because we do not have an IT system that allows us to do that efficiently.”
“So we went to aggregate numbers, which we report on every day, and we went to still reporting the outbreaks and then the aggregate numbers and then on a periodic basis getting the more detailed numbers. So it's not a policy change. It was merely trying to keep up with the amount of data that we were trying to collect and we are certainly willing to provide the aggregate numbers as we get them, and I do try and present that information in our statements and in our daily briefings.”