What do B.C.’s COVID-19 numbers actually reflect?

CFJC Today: What’s the estimate for the actual number of COVID-19 cases in B.C., and how accurate can today’s projections and models be if the demographic of people being tested is relatively exclusive?

Dr. Henry: I’ll address the second question — the demographic is not exclusive, that’s not the right way to characterize it. The focus is on people at highest risk of having this and the highest risk of creating issues with our healthcare system. We want to be able to absolutely detect outbreaks in hospitals, we know that our long term cares have been affected, particularly in the Lower Mainland, so focussing on those people who are in that milieu is important to help us understand risk and to be able to determine the people at highest risk in those settings. So we’re not excluding people; what we’re doing is focussing the testing on where we don’t know the source.

And again going back to estimations of numbers, there’s models that help us do that and I presented our expected — the numbers that we’re seeing right now is about 130 cases per million that would give us in the range of 2,000 to 3,000 people probably in the province that were infected at that point in time. But again, these are just models. So our testing strategy has been to test widely and we know that there’s transmission happening in communities that we don’t recognize and that’s where we have to focus our testing and our public health response on those as they pop up.

Below are some of the slides shared by Dr. Henry and Minister Dix at today’s briefing:

Image Credit: BC Government

by Ashley Legassic

What do B.C.’s COVID-19 numbers actually reflect?

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