COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations down again

Feb 15, 2022 | 4:35 PM Pete McIntyre

COVID-19 case numbers and hospitalizations have shown an improvement in British Columbia on the day it was announced restrictions will be eased.

B.C. is reporting 519 new cases of COVID-19, with no new infections registered for both the Fraser and Vancouver Coastal health regions.

The health ministry said while 519 new cases were reported, the total number of cases have only increased by 246 from Monday.

“This has resulted in no new cases reported in Fraser Health and Vancouver Coastal Health and a decrease in the overall total number of cases in these health authorities compared to yesterday. This is due to data reconciliation from switching between two reporting systems after a system-wide downtime over the past weekend,” the ministry explained.

The new cases include:

* Fraser Health: zero

* Vancouver Coastal Health: zero

* Interior Health: 287

* Northern Health: 145

* Island Health: 78

* People who reside outside of Canada: nine

There are 787 people in hospital with COVID-19 (down by 16 from Monday) and 124 are in intensive care (up by 5).

Since Monday, there have been two new deaths, both in Northern Health, for an overall total of 2,766.

There has been one new health-care facility outbreak at The Heights at Mt. View (Island Health).

The outbreak at Island View Place (Island Health) has been declared over, for a total of 39 facilities with ongoing outbreaks.

As of today, 90.4 per cent of eligible people five and older in B.C. have received their first vaccine dose, 85.3 per cent have had two doses and 53 per cent of those 12 and older have received third doses.