The number of people with COVID-19 in B.C. hospitals and in intensive care units (ICUs) is up this week, compared with last week, according to new BC Centre for Disease Control data.
The number of people who died from the disease in the week up until April 23 was 42, up from 27 in the previous week. The way the province counts those deaths is that the person must have tested positive within 30 days and then died. The death total therefore would include people who were positive and then died in car crashes.
Like last week, there were glitches in the data. The province's data shows its COVID-19 death toll rising by 70 people, to 3,147 even though it only lists 42 new COVID-19 deaths. That same mathematical incongruity happened last week, and a Ministry of Health official told Glacier Media that it was because the data is "tentative."
The data up until today shows that there are now 570 people in B.C. hospitals who have tested positive for the virus, up by 85 from the 485 hospitalized COVID-19 patients one week ago. Of those, 47 are in ICUs, up from 38 one week ago.
Data for new known infections is up until April 23, and it shows 2,276 people newly infected, up from 2,036 in the previous week.
Data for new infections has long been widely dismissed, and even Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has called it "not accurate." This is because Henry in December started telling people who were vaccinated and had mild symptoms to not get tested and to simply self-isolate. She said at the time that this was to increase testing capacity for those with more serious symptoms and those who are more vulnerable.
Given that there were 26,923 tests said to be conducted in the week up until April 23, the week's positive-test rate was 8.45 per cent. That compares with 26,872 tests in the previous week, and a positive-test rate of 7.57 per cent. •
