B.C. will now assume that all new COVID-19 cases in the province are one of the highly infectious variants, provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said Thursday (April 8) at a press conference where she announced a record-breaking 1,293 cases.

B次元官网网址淕iven this high rate of variants of concern, they will be to no longer routinely sequenced for confirmation,B次元官网网址� Henry said. There will be a proportion screened systematically over time to help the province understand new outbreaks, and Henry said that whole genome sequencing will help determine new variants.

Henry said that the B.1.1.7 variant, which has a B次元官网网址渃ompetitive advantageB次元官网网址� in B.C., has presented with slightly higher hospitalization rates. Overall, non-variant COVID cases have a hospitalization rate of 4.2 per cent, while B.1.1.7 has led to a hospitalization rate of five per cent. Hospitalizations among people who have the P1 variant have not increased.

According to B.C. Centre for Disease Control data, about 75 per cent of all variant cases in B.C. have been B.1.1.7. People between the ages of 20 and 49 make up 61 per cent of all variant cases in B.C.

Here are the hospitalizations with plain old , the B117 variant and the P1 variant.

B次元官网网址� Kat Slepian (@katslepian)

4.2% covid to hospital

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More to come.