Image Credit: CFJC Today

By Jill Sperling

COVID-19

Household gatherings responsible for most COVID-19 outbreaks in IH

Nov 27, 2020 | 4:11 PM

KAMLOOPS — Household gatherings continue to be the main source of COVID-19 transmission within Interior Health.

The guideline from the province is that people are to only gather among household members. No longer are people allowed to have a “safe six” bubble.

According to Interior Health’s Chief Medical Health Officer, Dr. Albert de Villiers, outbreaks and clusters of COVID-19 cases usually begin in the home.

“You’re in really close contact if you’re visiting in a house,” he said. “If you go to a bigger place or even if you go to a restaurant, you’ve usually got a COVID plan in place, where they’ve got certain things in place and you sit a little bit further apart, you wear masks and there’s hand sanitizer at the door, which doesn’t always happen in a private home. That’s why we see more spread in private homes.”

The spread of COVID-19 is greater in urban centres. De Villiers says there has been a particular issue within the Central Okanagan and Kelowna.

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He says it’s due to privacy that Interior Health is not providing the location of daily cases, however, there are plans in the works to put out community-specific numbers on a weekly basis.

“We are currently working on changing the monthly (reporting) to weekly,” de Villiers said, “so we can actually give more updates. That will probably come out next week, we’ll be able to share some more information. If you do it daily in a small community, it might get identifying. That’s the big thing; we don’t want to point people out because it’s peoples’ personal health information and there’s privacy issues.”