“It seems to be getting worse every year,” he said Wednesday. “We thought COVID was pretty bad and then this new flu seemed to break out and it was just awful.” Two of her children had been sick for weeks with bad coughs, and her 10-month-old was in the emergency room in Nanaimo on Tuesday being treated for a bad cold. “It was a long wait, because we were there at 2:30 in the morning and didn’t see a doctor until 8 in the morning,” he said. The Watsons are not alone. BC’s top doctor says we are indeed heading into respiratory season, with COVID, flu, RSV and colds hitting people of all ages hard – but especially children. “We’re now starting to see a gradual and a steeper increase over the last two weeks of respiratory disease within BC,” Dr. Bonnie Henry said at a press conference Wednesday. Still, Henry says there’s no need to return a mask order, though she recommends them for crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation and for those who may be sick. He says BC is in better shape this year than last year because of vaccines, higher immunity to COVID infections and flu shots. “I don’t see the need for a mask mandate by itself because we have a lot of other tools and we have a high level of protection against these respiratory diseases that are going around,” Henry said. A grassroots group called Protect our Province BC that includes doctors says it’s disappointed and believes BC needs to act before it’s too late. “Let’s not kid ourselves. We are at the beginning. We are not where Ontario is. But we can’t cope now,” said Lyne Filiatrault, a spokeswoman for the group. “What will it be in a month?” In a month, it will be the holiday season, when people will gather indoors for parties, and the breathing season will be even more vigorous. However, Henry says restrictions are not likely even then. “I don’t foresee us needing to take broader community-based measures the way we needed to last year given the impact we saw last year,” Henry said. It’s a prediction he qualified by saying it would depend on how the health care system — already under pressure — fares in a month’s time.
