 Good afternoon, I'm Adrienne Dix, BC's Minister of Health, beside me is Dr. Bonnery Henry, our provincial health officer for British Columbia. I just want to let members of the media and the public know that we will be doing a briefing tomorrow Saturday. It'll be here and it'll be at noon. I want to acknowledge the territories of the Musqueam of the Squamish of the Slewa Tooth, where we're giving this briefing today and I wanted to introduce our provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnery Henry. Thank you and good afternoon. So today we are announcing that we have 77 new cases tested here in British Columbia for a total of 348 people. This includes 200 in Vancouver Coastal Health, 95 in the Fraser Health region, 30 in Vancouver Island, 19 in the Interior Health region, and four in the Northern Health region. Of those, 22 people have been hospitalized or in hospital at the moment. 10 of those people are in ICU and six have now recovered fully from this disease. I did want to talk as well. We have a couple of long-term care facility outbreaks, including in our numbers, a new health care worker who's identified, associated with the Dufferin Care Centre and that centre is now being managed as an outbreak, as we do whenever we detect a case in a health care facility. So Fraser Health is addressing that issue today. In talking about health care workers, I think that is something that is always in the back of our minds as we've been going through this last number of weeks and I do want to say that we have had a number of health care workers who have been infected with this virus and today I really want to talk about my colleagues. I know how challenging it is when we are dealing with a new virus, a virus particularly for which we have no cure, we have no vaccine, we have no way of preventing it and we know that it can cause quite severe illness in people that we love and people that we care for and people that we're close to and it's been a tremendous challenge for our health care sector to watch what has been happening over those last few weeks and months around the world and I have been watching with them very very carefully and looking at what are the things that we need to do to best protect our health care workers and our health care sector here and I want my and so much of course in the beginning is very unclear but I do want to say we do know so much more now about this virus here and we know that hundreds of people have been safely cared for by our health care worker teams here in Vancouver, here in BC, here in Canada over the last few months and we know that they're safely cared for because of the dedication and the intense practice that we have in our health care workers system. We know as well that about two dozen of our health care workers here in British Columbia have been affected with this virus and I'm relieved and happy to say that none of them have had severe illness all of them have had very mild illness and there have been some very short hospitalizations but for the most part people have been managed at home and that is something that we're grateful for. It is everything that we do in the health care work in the health care setting that keeps us safe from this virus and these are things that I've talked with with my colleagues many times over the last number of weeks. It's identifying cases early and we've seen that around the world. It's when we have unrecognized cases that are in a hospital or in a care home that it gets transmitted and that's when people can get sick and that's when it gets passed on to others. It's making sure that we have administrative processes in place so we minimize the people that are in contact with somebody who's sick. We make sure that as soon as you go into the hospital and we talk about this a lot about the importance of calling ahead and as soon as you go in with the respiratory symptoms you're given a mask to prevent you from putting your droplets out there, prevent other people from being exposed. It's the engineering things like putting someone in a single room like making sure we have the right air exchanges in our hospitals and our settings and of course it's the personal protective equipment that health care workers wear that protect them as well and I know there's been a lot of angst and a lot of concern that we're not going to have the supplies that we need to best protect our health care workers across the spectrum whether it's the pre-hospital care in home care whether it's our community physicians whether it's our hospitals or our long-term care homes and I want to say that right now we have been working on this across the province and across the country and we do have the supplies that we need right now and we are committed to doing everything everything that we can to make sure that we continue to have what we need to best protect everybody in our health care system right now and that's my personal commitment as well. Finally I do want to say a little bit about the fact that you know we we have had these social distancing measures in place we've had gatherings that have to be curtailed and but we do need to we do need to make sure that we still have the resources that are available to support us we need businesses to support our health care workers in particular make sure we have food make sure we have child care and details around our child care strategy to support our essential workers will be coming out very shortly but we also need to make sure that we that there is appropriate precautions that are taken in certain settings to make sure that we are not allowing settings that allow transmission of this virus and we go back to the reasons that we're doing this the reason that we're doing this is so that we can build a firewall we can prevent transmission of this virus between us so that we can prevent the people who are going that are the most susceptible to having severe illness or dying from this disease from being exposed to it in the first place and that's the reason why we're doing all of these very extreme measures in many places and it's become clear to me that there are certain settings where this is really a challenge and we talked earlier about about restaurants and we put in some guidance around being able to to maintain a distance within the restaurant and it is becoming obvious as it has too many of the municipalities around here that this is a very challenging thing to do so from today my order is that restaurants must move to a take-out or delivery model only as a way to best protect us and to ensure that we can maintain those distances I also say that you know for many businesses they can and should stay open to support us but they need to have the important social distancing measures in place to ensure there's not that many people in the office environment for example there's not face-to-face meetings there's not congregation in groups it's also important and I've talked about this for us to go outside but like we do when we're inside we need to go outside with our close family with our small groups we're not to be outside in groups we're not to be out playing basketball we're not to be out sitting together in large groups on the beach watching the beautiful sunsets that we have because when we're out in groups like that the chances are that somebody will be exposed to this virus and then we'll bring it home to our family and our communities and that is what is going to spread the virus so right now and again this is not forever but right now we need to be in small groups we need to be with our family we need to be with our close friends one or two of us and we need to maintain our distance with others you know we must be united in these efforts and we need to build that firewall and make sure that we keep it as strong as we can and that there are no gaps thank you very much Dr Henry and I wanted to just lay out a couple of things that have changed and some new information that people have been asking for that I think people will be interested in this Dr Henry has said 77 new cases today for a total of 348 province wide to put that in context 22 of those cases are in acute care that's compared to or in a hospital compared to 17 yesterday and 10 are in ICU compared to nine yesterday and I just want to put in context for a moment two weeks ago the premier and Dr Henry and I laid out our pandemic preparedness plan we had been at stage one and dealing with acute care hospitals in terms of preparing them and opening up space and this Monday we went to stage two with the cancellation of non-urgent elective surgery I just want to briefly report out how significant these actions have been and what they've meant and what they mean in the system prior to the COVID-19 response we averaged about 103.5 capacity in our acute care system that capacity as of now our snapshot as of today is 78.5 percent that's a change in occupancy in a very short period and in particular this week of 25 percent or 2,398 beds in addition our critical care beds are at 61.8 capacity and I just want to put this in context because there's a lot of discussion of what people are doing in terms of preparing but I think in terms of preparedness as I said 22 patients currently in acute care just to put it in context this preparedness is not what happened in other jurisdictions and this shows how much we've learned from other jurisdictions we've acted and our actions have had consequences for a lot of people as you can see in these in these bed numbers but we've acted now to ensure that our acute care sector that our hospitals are more prepared for a possible surge or influx of patients and this has required extraordinary effort by everyone in the acute care sector and I wish to thank them we released and published the this morning I believe on the bccdc website the testing numbers this week which I believe are 17,912 I want to echo what Dr Henry said about the health care sector about health care workers that we must do everything possible to support our frontline workers and hospitals long-term care the entire healthcare sector to give them the confidence that they can do their jobs with the lowest possible risk of their health and well-being frontline staff are critical to beating this virus they are critical to beating this virus I know all British Columbians support the school and I want to say this directly to doctors to nurses to carers to those who keep our hospitals clean and safe to food support workers and everyone else on the front line we are grateful we are enormously grateful for all your efforts we're making headway together against this threat but we're far from prevailing everybody knows that but we also know Dr Henry has said it that you're performing miracles every day I want to make it as clear as I can we're going to spare no effort to ensure that you have the equipment you need to get the job done including the equipment to keep you safe we do have supplies in place and we're identifying more we will of course respect your collective agreements and do what it what it takes to provide the additional support child care and extra accommodation to help you work effectively we'll track down and punish anyone caught misappropriating the better word is stealing the supplies we need for your protection but our health care system doesn't exist in a vacuum it needs support from every part of society and every part of the economy and those essential services must continue they cannot be shut down they're equally critical to beating this virus of course we know when we've said it and everybody understands how important care aides and nurses and doctors are but so are pilots flying test kits to labs early education workers caring for our health workers kids grocery workers making sure we're all fed and longshoremen moving critical supplies across the dock we are grateful for your work too it must continue under safe conditions and we're taking additional steps to clarify the conditions under which important work can continue both in health care and the wider economy we'll have more to say on this shortly but we'll be calling on employers unions and worksite to develop the protocols under the supervision of Dr Henry to give those working in the economy the confidence they are doing so safely of course in addition to this and Dr Henry has made it clear with respect to restaurants and I've had occasion to talk to a number of mayors including the mayor of Vancouver today clarity about restaurants and the fact that they can only operate on their take-out basis I want to say this there's lots of discussion about all of the of the group of people that may not be following Dr Henry's orders it's our expectation that we all do so it's what we owe to one another and we must continue to do that I want to say a couple of extra things yesterday we convened the Isabelle McKenzie the seniors advocate staff of the Ministry of Health and MLAs of all parties including Shirley Bond and John Yap who are liberal members including Rona Ray Leonard and Janet Rutledge who are NDP members and Sonia First and O the Green Party House Leader to work together to build on the groundswell of community goodwill that is out there to support seniors they've come back and reported with recommendations working and using in the lines with better at home in the united way to make light to support seniors who are currently dealing with the consequences of social isolation necessary to protect their health we'll have more to say about this on Monday but I want to thank all the members of that committee and the actions that they have recommended are being put into into motion finally I just want to say we are all in this together and we're today we're going to find more ways to be all in in the fight and tomorrow we're going to find more and we need everyone to join us we've said it before but we need to say it again and again and again not just in settings like this but with to one another that that we have we know because Dr Henry has laid it out some of the toughest measures any anyone has seen that are required for all of us to keep each other safe some of it is simple soap and sleeve and social distance and self-isolate and stay home when you're sick and support seniors and elders and those who are vulnerable but starting now there's no longer any room for almost or pretty good or nearly enough starting now our individual fight our collective fight must be a hundred percent all of the time and a hundred percent of the effort and a hundred percent right I know it's a lot to ask of a lot of people I know people don't get the information all at the same time but we need to give our health care workers our health care professionals Dr Henry a whole team of people around the province who are preparing to deal with the health consequences of this virus we need to give them the flatten curve they need to provide the continued service and the continued care that will help everyone in the province right now and every moment from here on going all in on COVID-19 will save lives and the and our own lives and those of the ones we love it's just that simple the Vancouver coastal 85 a Fraser 30 the Vancouver 19 the total the cut the COVID-19 so this intensive patients we're ready to take your questions. Thank you minister Dix.