B.C.'s COVID-19 updates will soon be weekly, not daily, top doctor says

Health officials will soon be moving to a weekly model when it comes to COVID-19 updates, B.C.'s top doctor said Tuesday.

Speaking at a news conference during which she discussed decreasing transmission and an upcoming loosening of restrictions, Dr. Bonnie Henry said updates on the spread of the disease will be given out once a week.

She did not provide a specific date for the change, saying only that "hopefully that will be very soon."

Currently these updates are provided via written statement from the Health Ministry every weekday, and Henry is joined by Health Minister Adrian Dix at least once a week for a news conference.

Those updates were daily for months of the pandemic, and the switch to a weekly system was controversial, as it meant journalists were further restricted by how many questions they could ask of officials. They'd already been limited to one question plus one follow-up per news organization.

But when that change was made, the province committed to continuing updates through statements published online and sent to media each day, other than on weekends and holidays.

No details have been given on what the one-day-a-week update would look like, including what information the update will include and how it will be circulated.

Henry said the B.C. Centre for Disease Control is still figuring out the transition from pandemic to endemic, including what its surveillance of the disease will look like going forward.

Currently officials are keeping an eye on transmission in part through analysis of wastewater samples. Henry said blood samples collected for other reasons may also be a tool used by the BCCDC to monitor COVID-19, in combination with reporting from physicians.

She said the monitoring of the novel coronavirus may be integrated into the existing serious respiratory illness surveillance conducted by the BCCDC.

The province announced last month it is no longer reporting active cases and "recoveries," with Henry saying the change was a byproduct of the way the response has adapted to the Omicron variant. https://bc.ctvnews.ca/here-s-how-b-c-is-changing-the-data-it-releases-about-covid-19-1.5775209

"We'll be modifying our surveillance reports and looking at what are the important things that we need to monitor, and what is the timeframe that we need to monitor those in," she said in February.

While the daily updates include markers of the severity of the pandemic such as outbreaks, deaths and hospitalizations, the primary metric of interest for much of the pandemic was cases because it reflected the level of transmission. But in recent months, B.C.'s testing policies have changed, meaning many people who likely do have COVID-19, based on their symptoms, aren't actually confirmed as cases.

At one point, Henry said those daily case loads may be as much as five times lower than the true number of cases in British Columbians.

Hospitalizations, too, are less of an indicator than they initially seemed, as the figure given by the ministry includes not only people admitted for COVID-19, but also those admitted for other conditions who are then found to have the disease.