COVID-19 continues to exact a heavy toll across two Tri-City seniors homes, with the total death count rising to seven as of Friday, Dec. 4.
Four of those deaths have occurred at Coquitlam’s Belvedere Seniors Care Centre, which first reported a single test-positive case in a resident Nov. 3. Since then, 48 people at the facility have tested positive for the coronavirus, including 16 staff members and 32 residents — of those, one resident and two workers are actively fighting the virus.
Meanwhile, in Port Coquitlam at the Hawthorne Seniors Care Community, Fraser Health staff and the home’s workers continue to battle two simultaneous COVID-19 outbreaks at the facility.
At the home’s long-term care unit, a single resident has died, with a total of five residents and five staff testing positive for the virus — two residents and one worker remain actively infected.
At Hawthorne’s assisted living facility, the virus led to the deaths of another two residents, infecting a total of 25 residents and nine workers. However, only two staff members continue to test positive for the coronavirus.
In an interview with Fraser Health president and CEO Dr. Victoria Lee, the head of the health authority said teams are monitoring the long-term care and assisted living outbreaks “multiple times a day.”
“It’s taxing on everyone,” acknowledged Lee, before striking a cautiously optimistic tone. “It does look like things have turned a corner. We’re hopeful with the measures in place, we’ll be coming out the other end.”
But zoom out across the province and the numbers paint a different picture.
To date, 45% of all deaths due to COVID-19 have occurred in long-term care homes in B.C. Across Canada, that toll rises to a grim 74%, according to a live tally by the National Institute on Ageing.
Many of B.C.’s ongoing outbreaks are found in Fraser Health. As of Friday, Dec. 4, there were 33 active outbreaks in long-term care and assisted living facilities across the health authority, the earliest dating back to Oct. 22 and the most recent declared yesterday, Dec. 3.
The prevalence and deadly risk the virus poses to elderly in seniors care facilities puts the demographic at the top of the list for vaccine candidates, the first of which could arrive in B.C. as early as the first week of January 2021, according to provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry.
In a press conference Thursday, the province’s top doctor revealed health officials had launched a dry run to test logistical capacity and the challenges of distributing a potential vaccine across the province’s far-flung population.
Dubbed “Operation Immunization,” Henry confirmed seniors in long-term care and assisted living would be the first to receive a vaccine should it be approved by Health Canada.
The logistical challenges of distributing and inoculating millions of Canadians — in the case of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine, twice when you include the booster — still sit primarily in the hands of provincial and federal health officials, according to the head of Fraser Health.
“Fraser Health is part of the overall provincial planning process,” said Lee.
When asked what scenarios have been mapped out to get one of the candidate vaccines to seniors homes in Fraser Health, Lee said a team overseen by chief medical health officer Dr. Elizabeth Brodkin was in the process of running through a series of option which could include delivering the vaccine in mobile freezers to on-site vaccine clinics.
“There’s quite a bit of logistics,” added Lee. “It’s too early to tell.”
