The 44 deaths from COVID-19 in one week are the highest total since June 16.
BC had 44 deaths from COVID-19 in the week ending Oct. 22, which is the highest weekly death count reported since mid-June, the BC government announced Thursday (Oct. 27).
The death toll has risen by 12 since the week ending Oct. 15 and is the highest since June 16, when the province reported 50 deaths from COVID-19.
The province’s data is widely considered inaccurate, but it provides insight into trends.
The province’s methodology for calculating COVID-19 deaths is to include all people who have died after officially testing positive for COVID-19 in the past month, a process that could include people who die in traffic accidents . The countdown for this 30-day window also starts when a person tests positive for COVID-19 for the first time and does not reset the clock for subsequent detected infections.
Provincial health officer Bonnie Henry said in April, when she unveiled this new counting methodology, that the province’s Vital Statistics Agency will later determine that some deaths are not due to COVID-19 and that it would remove those deaths from the province’s total death toll. This process would mean that the number of deaths would increase weekly by less than the number of new deaths per week, the opposite of what is happening.
While BC had 44 new deaths in the week to Oct. 22, it increased its overall COVID-19 death toll by 59 to 4,485.
This data discrepancy follows a similar trend to the previous week’s update, when 44 cases were reported, but the death toll rose by 53.
BC’s Ministry of Health could not explain why this continues to happen, telling Glacier Media that the data “may be incomplete.”
Other new data said there are 292 people with COVID-19 in BC hospitals in the week ending Oct. 27, including 20 in intensive care units (ICUs). That’s down from 389 people with COVID-19 in BC hospitals, including 21 in ICUs, a week ago. But total hospitalizations rose from 29,206 to 29,475 week-on-week, an increase of 269.
BC’s count of hospitalized COVID-19 patients includes those who are in hospital for a variety of reasons and who have just tested positive for COVID-19. Henry has said that about half of the hospital’s patients with COVID-19 are such “incident” cases.
The official number of new COVID-19 infections detected in BC for the week to October 22nd is 534, down 94 from the 628 infections detected in the week to October 15th. Despite this, the government’s total count of COVID-19 infections during the pandemic rose by 531 to 387,451.
Data on new infections has been widely rejected for a long time. Even Henry, earlier this year, said the data on new cases “is not accurate.” That’s because in December it began telling people who were vaccinated and had mild symptoms not to get tested and to simply self-isolate. He said at the time that this was to increase testing capacity for those with more severe symptoms and those who are most vulnerable.
The cases that were detected came from just 6,517 official tests in the week ending Oct. 22, up 64 tests from the last reporting period. This week 12.06 percent of the tests were positive.
Testing was much more widespread in September, with weekly testing exceeding 15,000 several times.
The province no longer reports how many seniors’ homes have active outbreaks.
With files from Glen Korstrom