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Of the approximately 1,000 people in hospital with COVID-19 in B.C. this week, 36 of those patients were in Lions Gate Hospital on the North Shore, seven of them in critical care, according to Vancouver Coastal Health.
Those numbers come at a time when COVID-19 related hospitalizations are peaking in the province. Monday (Jan. 31) marked the first day when the number of people in hospital with COVID-19 soared above 1,000. On Thursday the province list 985 people with COVID in hospital, 145 of them in intensive care.
The spike in hospital numbers comes about a month behind the peak in new COVID-19 infections, which happened at the beginning of January.
“Hospitalizations are what we call a lagging indicator, it takes time,” said Dr. Bonnie Henry, the province’s health officer, this week. “And we have had very high levels of transmission in the community for some time now. And we have seen this translate into hospitalizations most recently. This is what we are experiencing at the moment.”
According to information presented by Henry on Tuesday, about 40 per cent of people in hospital with COVID-19 weren’t admitted because of COVID-19 symptoms. Instead, those people came to hospital with another medical issue and only discovered they had COVID-19 after they were tested. In some cases, people admitted to hospital for other reasons contracted the virus in hospital.
Overall, people with the Omicron variant are half as likely to end up in hospital than they were with the Delta variant, said Henry. Those with Omicron also stay in hospital about half as long as those hospitalized with Delta and are far less likely to end up in ICU or to die in hospital.
But Henry warned that even a “1.3 per cent risk of hospitalization is still very high when you have thousands of people a day who are being infected.”
Most significantly, the Omicron surge has also resulted in hospital staff being off sick, putting a strain on remaining staff. Health Minister Adrian Dix called the situation “very challenging.”
To deal with staff shortages, the province is continuing to postpone non-urgent surgeries.
Between Jan. 1 and Jan. 29 there were 19 main operating room surgeries postponed at Lions Gate Hospital, according to Vancouver Coastal Health.
That number does not include surgeries postponed in smaller procedure rooms or surgeries postponed due to patients becoming infected with COVID-19.
