New COVID-19 cases fell during the latest reporting period, health officials say.
The BC Centre for Disease Control's (BCCDC) Graphic Distribution of COVID-19 by Local Health Area of Case Residence says Burnaby saw 24 cases from Aug. 14 to 20.
The city recorded 39 cases from Aug. 7 to 13.
Provincially, 33 lives were lost to the virus in the week that ended Aug. 20, updated data says.
While this is the highest count since June 16, 10 weeks ago, government data can be unreliable.
The province raised its overall COVID-19 death toll to 4,097, since the first death was recorded in March 2020, in North Vancouver. That count is up by 60, compared with the previous week, despite 33 new deaths. On August 18, the province said there were 24 new deaths in the week up to August 13, for a total of 4,037.
Data for new COVID-19 deaths includes anyone who tested positive for COVID-19 within 30 days and then died – a calculation that could include people who tested positive and then died in car accidents.
The latest count of people who as of today are in hospital and have tested positive for COVID-19 is 331. That is down from the 366 people identified as being in hospital one week ago, on August 18.
The government has said that it updates these numbers once per week, but in each of the past two weeks it has slipped in an additional update after it first provided the weekly numbers. Earlier today, the government's COVID-19 dashboard showed that there were 390 people in hospital as of August 18, so today's tally would be an even larger decline from one week ago.
Of those now counted as being in hospital with COVID-19, 29 are in intensive care units (ICUs). That is up from the 22 ICU COVID-19 patients originally counted as being in those units on August 18, and from the 24 ICU COVID-19 patients in the province's updated tally for that day, which appeared sometime in the past week.
The government said today that 737 new infections were detected in the week ended August 20 – down by 140 from the 877 known new infections in the week ended August 13.
- with files from Glen Korstrom, Business In Vancouver
