It was one year ago today when B.C.’s provincial health officer first appeared on CHEK News to share the advice that has now become like a mantra to most British Columbians.
“Clean your hands regularly cover your mouth when you cough and stay away from others when you’re sick,” she said on January 21, 2020.
Dr. Henry’s sit-down interview took place on the same day the first case of the new coronavirus strain arrived in North America.
“It’s one we haven’t seen before, it’s clearly infecting humans and there is some transmission human to human,” Dr. Henry said at the time.
Like many other health officials at the time, Dr. Henry predicted what the new strain would bring based on her experience with another coronavirus—SARS.
“It doesn’t seem to be causing as severe illness as what we saw with SARS and what we see with MERS,” she said. It was a view shared by many global health experts at the time.
But as with anything developing, scientists started to learn more as the virus spread and, largely due to air travel, it spread quickly.
China first reported an unusual pneumonia in Wuhan to the World Health Organization on December 31. North America’s first case was near Seattle, Washington on January 21. The first suspected case in Canada was a passenger who had arrived at Toronto’s airport on January 25. B.C. saw its first case in Vancouver just a few days later on January 28 and Island Health reported its first case on March 11.
From that first case one year ago, North America now has nearly 27 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 570-thousand people have died from the virus.
Worldwide there are now more than 95 million cases and there have been more than two million deaths.
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But one other thing experts likely didn’t predict in those early days of the pandemic is that scientists would develop a vaccine for the new virus, and start putting it in people’s arms, less than a year later.
April Lawrence
