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New Westminster's COVID-19 case count jumps again

The official count has gone up by 60% in a week.
Julie MacLellan
Julie MacLellan
COVID test swab
The official COVID-19 case count in New Westminster jumped significantly over the first week of September.Morsa Images/Getty Images

New Westminster's COVID-19 case count jumped by 60 per cent over the past week.

The city saw 16 new officially recorded cases between Sept. 4 and 10, according to the latest B.C. Centre for Disease Control data. That's up from just 10 between Aug. 28 and Sept. 3.

As has been the case since January, those numbers do not reflect the total number of actual COVID cases in the city. Official public case counts are considered to be a vast undercount of COVID-19 cases in B.C., since the majority of people have not been eligible for testing since the beginning of 2022.

In fact, in August, the B.C. COVID-19 Modelling Group suggested the real number of cases was likely 100 times higher than officially reported numbers.

By comparison, however, local numbers still remain much lower than January — when equally few people were eligible for testing but the city still saw more than 200 cases in a week (216 between Jan. 9 and 15).

B.C. provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix postponed a press briefing set for today that was to include epidemiological modelling for the virus in the province. A new date for the briefing has yet to be announced.

COVID-19 hospitalization data makes small improvements in B.C.

Provincewide hospitalization data shows minor improvements over last week. B.C. now has 314 people in hospitals with COVID-19, including people who tested positive for the virus while in hospital for something else. That's down by 10 from one week ago.

Of those now in hospital with the disease, 23 have serious enough bouts of disease to be in intensive care units (ICUs) – one more than one week ago.

Hospitalization data is not available on a local level, so New Westminster-specific numbers are unavailable.

Where can I find B.C. COVID-19 data?

For the latest information available regarding variants of concern, vaccination, local case counts and more, see the BCCDC's COVID-19 data page.

– with files from Glen Korstrom

Follow Julie MacLellan on Twitter @juliemaclellan.
Email Julie, [email protected]