The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Northern Health stood at 26 and unchanged since Friday, according to numbers provided Monday by provincial health officer Bonnie Henry.
Province wide, the count grew by 45 since Saturday, increasing the total to 1,490.
Those recovered stood at 905, unchanged since Sunday, while there were 11 new deaths, raising that total to 69. The number in Northern Health who have recovered was not provided.
As of Friday, 12 patients in the region had recovered, according to the B.C. Centre for Disease Control. Monday marked the 50th public update from Henry since the crisis began.
She continued to stress the importance of staying at home as much as possible, practicing physical distancing while out in public and regular hand washing.
"It is so important for all of us to keep going with everything that we are doing now," Henry said. "It is holding our line, it is allowing us to deal with these issues in a way that is the best that we can do for our province."
Asked what she would need to see in B.C. to start lifting restrictions, Henry said there is a "whole variety of things that we are looking at," including how the situation is unfolding elsewhere in Canada and the United States.
"I will say that the basics - the hand hygiene, the safe distancing, the making sure that our workplaces are able to have the enhanced cleaning...the working from home - those are things that are not going to change for awhile," Henry said.
"Those are the things we are going to have to think about for the next coming months until we have enough herd immunity that we are not going to get a dramatic increase in infections in our community."
Asked about a new portable rapid test developed by Ottawa-based Spartan Bioscience and approved by Health Canada over the weekend, Henry said laboratories in B.C. are already doing the same type of test with the help of GeneXpert, a machine made by U.S.-based Cepheid.
"Our strategy right now is to deploy those to areas of the province where we're having challenges with turn-around time for testing, and that will be rolled out over the next week or so," Henry said.
Henry also said it appears the Spartans that have been produced have already been spoken for and new ones would not be available until the summer.
