COVID-19 in the Island Health region by the numbers
Updated on Thursday evenings.
Photo courtesy of the Province of British Columbia.
The spread of COVID-19 in the Island Health region is being tracked by the BC Centre for Disease Control (CDC). The charts on this page are updated in the evenings on Thursdays.
COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths
As cases of COVID-19 testing is limited and case counts become of limited value, an important point of data to track is the number of hospitalizations and deaths. The B.C. CDC is providing the total number of people who have been admitted to hospital and critical care once a week on Thursdays. We use hospital admissions because they capture the number of people hospitalized, not only those who are currently infectious. Hospital data include admissions for people diagnosed with COVID-19 through hospital screening practices, and will overestimate the number of people who are hospitalized specifically due to severe symptoms of COVID-19 infection. On April 2, the BC CDC stopped reporting COVID-19 admissions to ICU, instead reporting how many people were admitted to the broader critical care category. The regional ICU chart has been archived here.
Cases in the Island Health Region
The Island Health region covers 858,785 people on Vancouver Island, the islands in the Salish Sea and the Johnstone Strait and the mainland communities north of Powell River and south of Rivers Inlet. To help show the overall trends clearly, most charts on this page use a smoothed seven-day rolling average such as this one that shows the average number of new cases in Island Health each day. In late January 2022, British Columbia moved to only testing people who are at risk of severe outcomes such as people over 80, in care homes or who are unvaccinated so the cases are severely undercounted. In this context it makes sense to also look at the trajectory of the average testing rate and positivity rates alongside the case counts.
The Vancouver Island Health Area is divided into three smaller Health Service Delivery Areas, one each for the North, Central and South Island. To help compare between regions and age groups with different populations we use a rate of cases per 100,000 residents. The Health Service Delivery Areas are further broken down into Local Health Areas.
The Local Health Area of Greater Nanaimo is broken down into six Community Health Service Areas. The weekly rates of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents in those areas have been provided starting on Nov. 15, 2021. They are updated every Tuesday and Friday.
New cases in British Columbia
There have been five “waves” of COVID-19 infection over the past two years, driven largely by new variants of concern and the level of non-medical public health interventions such as gathering restrictions, mask mandates, and work from home orders.
The first wave in the spring of 2020 was relatively small due to strict public health measures and a high-degree of voluntary reduction of social contacts by British Columbians.
The second wave was in the fall and winter of 2020, while the third wave was in the spring of 2021 and driven largely by the new Alpha variant, the fourth wave started in the summer of 2021 after public health measures were relaxed and was driven by the Delta variant, leading to some public health orders such as the indoor mask mandate being brought back.
The fifth wave started in December 2021, driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant and quickly surpassed all previous waves in case counts and overwhelmed testing capacity.
Covid testing is limited in the province and cases are being undercounted. In this context it is also important to look at the test positivity rates as they may become a more accurate indicator of the prevalence of COVID-19.
First Nations in B.C. and COVID-19
First Nations people in British Columbia have consistently had higher rates of infection than the general population. This has been most pronounced during the winter of 2021 and the fourth wave starting late July 2021, while the rate for First Nations people peaked slightly lower in the fifth wave, but was slower to fall.
In an interview with CHLY in March 2021, the FNHA’s acting chief medical officer Dr. Shannon McDonald outlined some of the reasons that First Nations people were disproportionally impacted by the disease.
“In many of our communities there is a high rate of individuals who live in multi-generational homes or where a lot of people live together,” she said. “So when somebody who is positive for COVID, unknowingly, shares that joy with the people they live with, rather than having one person who may be a partner getting COVID, it could be as many as seven, eight or more in a household.”
Dr. McDonald says that the close-knit nature of many First Nations communities means that “often there would be, despite our advice, lots of visiting back and forth for cultural ceremonies and shared resources.”
Data for First Nations cases is provided once a week in a Community Situation Report by the First Nations Health Authority (FNHA ) and includes information such as vaccination coverage rates.