A COVID-19 outbreak has been traced to one of the City of Burnaby’s warming centres, according to provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry.
The announcement was made Thursday afternoon by Henry during her regular update on local cases. Henry said there are three cases that have been traced to the Beresford warming centre in South Burnaby.
That warming centre – set up to provide a warm place for people who are homeless - was actually closed down on Monday as the city phased out several of the facilities for the season. Officials had previously told the NOW that every effort was being made to promote physical distance for those using the warming centres.
Henry said health officials are working to determine all contact by the three people who have tested positive for COVID-19 to ensure there aren’t additional cases.
“We're hopeful that means the transmission has been limited and most of the cases are in staff,” Henry said. “Public health teams from Fraser Health are on site and actively investigating and tracing anybody who may have had contact."There are now 2,632 cases of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in B.C., after health officials announced nine new cases Thursday.
There have been nine total new cases. However, five of these cases tested positive, while four are epidemiologically-linked. Epidemiologically-linked cases are close contacts of a person who tested positive, but for any of variety of reasons did not get a positive test - they may have had mild illness or were identified when illness was recovered.
Henry reports that there are 909 cases in Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), 1,334 n Fraser Health, 130 on Vancouver Island, 195 in Interior Health and 64 in Northern Health
There have been no new health-care facility outbreaks. In total, six long-term care or assisted-living facilities continue to have active outbreaks.
Public health teams continue to provide support for community outbreaks at federal corrections facilities, the processing facilities in the poultry sector and for individuals connected to the Kearl Lake plant in Alberta.
There have been no new COVID-19 deaths.
There are currently 26 people in acute care in hospital and six are in intensive care.
There are 201 active cases of COVID-19 in the province, and 2,265 people who tested positive have recovered.
- With additional reporting by Elana Shepert, Vancouver is Awesome
