Wear a mask and distance in indoor public spaces, wash your hands often and stay home if you're sick. Ventilation of indoor spaces is also important.
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B.C. has changed its strategy on how it will manage COVID-19, shortening isolation times, tightening eligibility for testing and doing away with contact tracing.
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The changes are taking place as the rapidly transmissible Omicron variant has exploded in B.C., but with evidence that it causes less severe illness in most people and a belief that the latest wave peaked earlier in January.
The changes have caused some confusion.
Dr. Brian Conway, president and medical director of the Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre, say, however, that in the face of these changes, the tools to provide protection from infection have changed little.
Wear a mask and distance in indoor public spaces, wash your hands often and stay home if you’re sick. Ventilation of indoor spaces is also important.
If you’re not vaccinated for COVID, get vaccinated.
“I think the vaccination piece is going to continue to be key,” says Conway.
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While vaccination rates are high in B.C., there are still several hundred thousand people who have chosen not get vaccinated, noted Conway.
And there are blank spots, he said.
As part of the work the infectious disease centre does, it canvassed a single room occupancy hotel in the Downtown Eastside where it found that 30 of 100 residents hadn’t been vaccinated even though health authorities believed they had very good coverage.
More than 10.3 million jabs have been delivered in the province, with 90 per cent of those 12 and older fully vaccinated with two doses.
“It’s a tremendous success but what we need is 15 million,” said Conway.
On Friday, in the province’s latest COVID briefing, provincial health officials noted that they continue to see a decrease and slowdown in coronavirus cases and “tentatively” a slowing down in hospital admissions.
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However, officials noted that cases and hospitalizations remain high relative to previous levels during the pandemic.
A similar scenario is playing out in other provinces in Canada, including Ontario, and in some countries such as South Africa and the U.K.
B.C. modelling presented earlier this month showed hospitalizations dropping off to a handful of cases a day by mid-February.
As a result of Omicron, the province has made a number of changes in how it will manage the pandemic. Those include dropping contract tracing because of the variant’s shorter incubation period, dispensing with testing to anyone with symptoms and reducing to five the number of days people who have COVID should isolate unless symptoms persist.
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Only those who are in high-risk groups — such as those 70-years-or-older or people who have compromised immune systems — are priority candidates for testing, provincial health officials have explained.
The latest data available shows Omicron accounts for more than 96 per cent of cases, overtaking the previous Delta variant.
“I absolutely recognize this is a shift, and it means we have to change our way of thinking that we have been working on so intently together for the last two years,” says Dr. Bonnie Henry, the province’s health officer.
COVID will now be managed much more like other respiratory illnesses such as the flu or even the common cold, said Henry.
Conway noted COVID hasn’t yet moved from the pandemic stage to an endemic illness were transmission level is lower, predictable and doesn’t overwhelm the health-care system.
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There may be a better idea of when the endemic level might happen by the summer, said Conway.
He cautioned, however, that the worldwide vaccination rate is nowhere near where it needs to be to prevent new variants from emerging.
In Africa, most of the countries have rates of less than 20 per cent for at least one dose of vaccine. In India, for example, only about half of the population is fully vaccinated.
Conway said that this reality underscores the need for those who aren’t vaccinated in B.C. to do so.
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COVID-19: Tools to combat Omicron remain unchanged as province shifts pandemic strategy, expert says - Vancouver Sun
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