It’s Monday, which means it’s time for another weekly chart of COVID-19 new infections.
Earlier this week our numbers were looking comparatively much better than the previous week. I had been crunching the numbers in my head, and was really hoping to be able to say that our new infection numbers would be in decline with today’s post. But unfortunately the numbers are what they are, and we are still seeing an increase in numbers week-to-week.
Looking at the graph we can see that the increase from the previous week’s numbers is much smaller than we’ve seen in a while. In fact it’s only a 2.7% increase over the previous week’s numbers. Hopefully this means we will see a decline in numbers by this time next week. However, it’s impossible to truly predict the infection rate, so the best thing we can do is remind our friends and family to try to keep their risk levels low, ensure physical distancing as much as possible, keep good hygiene, and to use clean dry masks when necessary.
Here is a link to the official BC Government statement which includes details of recent outbreaks, and our numbers. I recommend reading it, there’s a lot of good info, as well as renewed requests for people to take a step back from physical social interactions.
There is a video produced by the BC Government that shows Dr. Bonnie Henry speaking with a number of children of different ages in a school room setting, which people have been complaining does not represent what children will see when they go back to school shortly. In her address today, Dr. Bonnie Henry discussed the video, and mentioned that it was not intended to imply what conditions would be like, it was a video taken of her answering children’s questions and talking to them about how the school year would be different than previous years.
The next logical question would seem to be, why not make the video represent what school will be like for children? But it seems the answer to that is because there will be a wide variety of experiences that will differ from school to school and district to district, and it’s impossible to give one example that would reflect any number of them. Regardless, I think it’s easy to understand how people could be confused or frustrated over the video. More info can be found here.
Previously Dr. Bonnie Henry and Minister Adrian Dix have made frustrated comments about how the airline industry’s systems have made it difficult to do proper contact tracing for infected passengers. Some good news come out recently that West Jet is now taking steps to implement new steps that will make contact tracing much easier going forward. Hopefully this will help prevent secondary and tertiary infections. More info can be found here.
The attached image of a Facebook post was also recently brought to my attention regarding the situation of local chocolate maker Purdy’s Chocolates. If you are able to, please consider making an extra purchase of chocolate from them at your soonest convenience, just to help them out. And of course, chocolate is an excellent way to beat the COVID-19 blahs from isolation.
That’s all for now! Stay safe everyone 
BC COVID-19 Info 