VANCOUVER — Tuesday’s COVID-19 update for British Columbia wouldn’t have been particularly striking, if not for an unusually large drop in active cases.
Even though officials announced another 96 infections, the province’s active caseload plummeted to 1,465, down from 1,987 on Monday.
That’s a drop of 522 cases, or about 25 per cent of the caseload – a sharp decline that’s unprecedented in B.C., where active case numbers have usually been fairly stable whether they were going up or down.
The cause? An equally unheard of spike in recoveries. B.C.’s total number of recovered cases jumped to 6,589 on Tuesday, an increase of 617 from Monday.
The Ministry of Health told CTV News that was largely the result of a delay in the reporting of recovery data in the Vancouver area.
“The large shift in today’s total recovered cases reflects Vancouver Coastal Health’s delay in notifying (the B.C. Centre for Disease Control) of recovered cases in the last month, while they transitioned to a new data collection system,” a spokesperson said in an email.
“The system is now fully implemented and the data is up to date. All cases were assessed and cleared by public health from isolation at the appropriate time.”
Previously, the highest number of recoveries announced in a single day was 121 cases back in March.
It’s unclear whether any other data reporting was delayed as a result of the health authority’s transition to a new collection system, but the number of cases reported in the Vancouver Coastal Health region has been climbing steadily.
CTV News has contacted Vancouver Coastal Health for more information on the transition.
The province-wide increase of 96 new cases announced on Tuesday was nothing unusual, though it was below the average of 132 cases per day that was recorded over the previous week.
