Children aged 5 and up added to B.C.’s mask mandate

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“For youth, whether taking the school bus or the city bus, the rules will be the same,” Henry stated. “And I just want to say how impressed I am — I continue to be amazed at the adaptability and resilience of children across this province — and many of them have told me they know how to wear a mask now and it’s something they do to keep themselves and their families safe, and I just want to say thank you,” said the province’s top doctor.

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Henry also said the province is getting ready to provide vaccines for children 5 to 11 years old as soon as the vaccines are approved by Health Canada.

“We may have that important vaccine available to us as early as early November,” she said.

Parents can pre-register their children on the province’s Get Vaccinated website.

There are about 340,000 children between the ages of 5 and 11 in B.C.

As of today, all long-term care and assisted living employees in B.C. need to have at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine in order to work.

Those who have received a single dose will have to undergo rapid testing daily and must receive a second shot within 35 days of their first.

Henry said B.C. is looking at whether third doses are needed for other populations, other than for those who are immunocompromised and residents of long-term care who were previously approved for the booster shots.

“We are looking at other populations and we’ll be gathering that data and looking at how we may roll those out in the future,” said Henry.

Henry stated they are concerned about numbers in the northern B.C. where COVID-19 is “spreading at higher than the average rate,” mostly in unvaccinated young people.

New measures to break that chain of spread are being considered, but in the meantime, residents of Northern Health are encouraged to “get back to the basics,” by washing hands, keeping safe distances, and wearing a mask.

Health Minister Adrian Dix said they are seeing the effects of the serious COVID-19 cases in the north on the health care system, with patients having to be transferred to other facilities, including to Vancouver and Victoria.

He said 55 critical care patients have recently been transferred from Northern Health to hospitals in other areas of B.C., and 43 were were positive for COVID-19 and 42 were not fully vaccinated.

Dix said 88.8 per cent of all eligible residents 12 and older have had one vaccine dose while 82.6 per cent have had two doses.

“That’s impressive by any standard, but we simply need it to be higher,” Dix remarked.

In the meantime, Henry said she is “actively working” on updating capacity limits for events, adding they will be making a decision on that by the end of this week.

Henry says almost all of the new cases in B.C. have been the Delta variant which she says “spreads rapidly when it finds a toehold when people are not protected by vaccination.”