A COVID-19 outbreak has been declared on the fifth floor of the Joseph & Rosalie Segal Family Health Centre (Segal Centre) at Vancouver General Hospital after two clients tested positive for COVID-19.
The unit is closed to new admissions and transfers at this time. All non-essential visits to the Segal Centre have been suspended until the outbreak measures have been lifted; the exception being for compassionate visits at the end of life.
Vancouver Coastal Health has immediately implemented strict infection prevention and control protocols to prevent further transmission of COVID-19. These include:
Careful monitoring of patients, staff and physicians
Enhanced cleaning and disinfection of all high-touch surfaces
Closing the units to patient admissions and transfers
Cohorting of staff to the affected areas
Self-monitoring or self-isolation of staff/physicians as part of Public Health contact tracing
Suspension of visitors to the unit (with exemptions for end-of-life situations)
In a press briefing organized by the think-tank Chatham House in London, Peter Daszak estimated that collective scientific research might be able to pin down how animals carrying COVID-19 infected the first people in Wuhan identified last December.
Const. James Grandy says in a statement that the RCMP Explosive Disposal Unit will help investigate two confirmed explosions and other potential blasts. Grandy says police are investigating explosions on March 7 at a local soccer field and on March 8 on the grounds of Carmi Elementary School.
Of the active cases, 255 individuals are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, 67 of whom are in intensive care. The remaining people with COVID-19 are recovering at home in self-isolation.
Const. Gary O'Brien says the teen alerted his friends and may have averted a similar incident because a 17-year-old whose pickup was parked in the same lot received the message and before driving off, he found the lug nuts on a rear tire had also been loosened.
The partnership was originally planned to be between China's CanSino Biologics and the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. CanSino had been given a licence by the National Research Council to use a Canadian biological product as part of a COVID-19 vaccine.
