B.C. health officials have confirmed 21 new cases of COVID-19, marking five days in a row of higher daily case counts.
Three of the new cases are epi-linked, which means the person did not test positive for the virus but displayed some symptoms after being in close contact with an infected person or work in a facility with a known outbreak.
That brings the total number of active confirmed cases to 192, provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said in a news conference on Thursday (July 16).
Fifteen people are in hospital with three of those in intensive care. There were no new deaths since Wednesday afternoon.
Since the novel coronavirus was first confirmed in B.C. in February, there have been 3,170 confirmed cases.
The new cases were announced on the same day that results of a study by a group of B.C. researchers was released, suggesting eight times more people in B.C. have been infected with COVID-19 than the confirmed test stats.
Henry said that serology testing will help determine if transmission has been missed “when cases pop up out of nowhere seemingly.”
She says when an outbreak occurred in Alert Bay off northern Vancouver Island, the province did serology testing on residents there.
“That gives us a better idea of how this virus is transmitted in community settings so we can more nimbly target outbreaks as we go into the fall,” she said.
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