As B.C. sees an ongoing surge in new COVID-19 cases, health officials announced promising news that Kelowna’s Canada Day community cluster has ended.
In early July, Kelowna was in the spotlight for being home to a number of test-positive cases, linked to hotel parties involving those in their 20s and 30s.
On Monday (Aug, 31), provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry confirmed no new cases had been linked to those parties for 14 days.
As of Aug. 28, Interior Health confirmed 171 cases within the health authority’s region had been connected to Kelowna since June 26. Through contact tracing, hundreds of cases across B.C. were quickly linked to the Kelowna cluster event, but that exact number is unknown.
The BC Centre for Disease Control released data by local health area for the first time on Aug. 28, providing a more city-level look at where cases of COVID-19 were most prevalent. That data showed the Central Okanagan had recorded 209 cases of the virus between January and the end of July, topping all areas outside the Lower Mainland and notching the fourth-highest case count in the province behind Vancouver (716 across six health areas in the city), Surrey (521) and Abbotsford (454).
Areas surrounding the Central Okanagan saw significantly fewer cases, with the Kamloops area reaching 53 cases, the Vernon area netting 21, Merritt with six, Osoyoos/Oliver with six, Penticton with five and Summerland with two. Princeton and Keremeos both recorded zero cases.
Interior Health (IH) announced a total of seven new COVID-19 cases were reported in the region since Friday, bringing the total cases in the IH region to 440. Currently, 19 cases are active and those individuals are now in isolation with no one in the hospital.
As of Monday, 1,107 people across the province were actively battling the virus, with 28 of those people in hospital and the rest in self-isolation.
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