B.C.’s top doctor admits that contact tracing in the province has been a challenge as cases surge.
Dr. Bonnie Henry says about 20 to 25 per cent of cases can’t be traced back to a source, and it has been that way for some time.
“I wouldn’t say we’re losing [the battle] but we’re on the edge for sure,” she said on Wednesday. “Most of the cases are definitely linked and ones that we find, we may not find them in time before they’ve passed on to the next generation and that’s where we’re trying to catch up.”
Henry says contact tracing has especially been a challenge in the Fraser Health Authority because of a rapid increase in cases in a short period of time over the past several weeks – though she notes most of the cases are linked.
“You know, we are still very much committed to our contact tracing approach and it is still within our grasp though as I mentioned last week in particular, it was getting very very close,” she said.
Health Minister Adrian Dix says the province has so far hired 935 additional contact tracers, 222 of which were in the last week alone. He says Statistics Canada is also sending 70 federal workers to the province, taking the number of people working to contact trace in B.C. to over 1,000 on top of those who were contact tracing prior to September.
“There are 399 more candidates in the interview stage and 109 candidates in the offer process,” Dix added, noting the plan now is to hire over 1,200 contact tracers, more than double the 500 announced by Premier John Horgan in August.
“We’ve had extraordinary response given those numbers from people who want to do this work and I think that tells you a little bit about how people who are involved in health care are committed to helping people in this time of pandemic.”
As for whether the plan is working well enough, Dr. Henry noted it was too early to say.
“It’s always a challenge to get things in place in time,” she said. “You know, there are so many things so I don’t think we’re at the point where we can say we should have done one thing or another thing — we’ve tried a whole bunch of things,” she said. “I will say that I was surprised at how soon in the fall we started to see the surge.”
“We had an explosive growth in the Lower Mainland and now we’re seeing that that’s spreading around to other parts of the province. So the orders I brought in last Thursday [are an attempt at] trying to get ahead in all the other parts of our province, not [getting] behind like we were a bit in Fraser Health.”
As of publishing, there have been 29,086 cases of COVID-19 in the province, of which 7,616 with 294 people in hospital with 61 in ICU.
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