Interior Health’s Medical Health Officer in Kamloops says public health officials will be investigating what caused the COVID-19 outbreak at Royal Inland Hospital to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Speaking on NL Newsday, Dr. Carol Fenton says among the things they’ll be hoping to figure out is how the outbreak started.

“COVID-19 has such a long incubation period, anywhere from four to 14 days so it makes the investigation of where it came from and who had it first much trickier. So that’s ongoing,” she said. “We’re still waiting for the whole genome sequencing information but when we declared the outbreak we implemented a number of different control measures that definitely seem to have worked.”

Fenton though says health officials are able to learn a lot about the virus every time there is an outbreak.

“We’re still doing the investigation and we’re also working on a debrief, lesson’s learned and considering writing a new guideline in terms of best way to work together through something like this,” she said. “I’m always dedicated to quality improvements”

The outbreak at RIH was declared over on Monday, Feb. 22, exactly one month after it was broke out on Jan. 22. According to Interior Health, there were 105 COVID-19 cases linked to the outbreak – 69 staff and 36 patients. There were four deaths when the outbreak was declared over, however, two more deaths were announced this past Wednesday, taking the total deaths linked to the RIH outbreak to six people.

“With the people passing away unfortunately, how that works is, I’ll try to explain. Say you get sick as part of the outbreak. Lets say you get sick two weeks ago, and then you deteriorate over time. So by the time we call the outbreak over, there is no sustained transmission anymore, there’s no high number of new cases happening everyday, and spreading it from person to person,” Interior Health Chief Medical Health Officer, Dr. Albert De Villiers said.

“The outbreak specially means at that stage the cases are increasing and there is sustained spread within the population. So as soon as that changes, we can call the outbreak over because there is not sustained spread anymore within that population.”

During his weekly media briefing, De Villiers also said there there are no longer any active cases linked to the outbreak at Royal Inland Hospital.

Health officials though caution there continue to be cases in the Kamloops area. The most recent data from the BC CDC shows 78 new cases reported between the week of Feb. 14 and Feb. 20, down from 116 cases the week before.

“The number one most important predictor of whether or not we have outbreaks in facilities is the rate of COVID circulation in community,” Dr. Fenton added. “And so in Kamloops, we’re still seeing a very high rate of COVID circulation and so the best thing we can do is really adhere to all the prevention measures and get that one under control.”

– With files from Colton Davies