Page 58 - Rob Munro News Today

March 31, 2021 - 1:30 PM Given increased COVID-19 cases, an uptick in interest by skiers from outside the region and the unauthorized partying at a Big White restaurant earlier this week, the resort has decided to close on Monday, April 5 rather than April 11. “We made the decision to stay open until April 11 back in June of last year,” Peter Plimmer, president and CEO of Big White Ski Resort Ltd. said in a news release. “Since then, a lot has changed. In the past week, ...

Image Credit: Submitted/Interior Health April 01, 2021 - 2:57 PM To date, there have been 70 cases of COVID variants of concern in the Interior Health region but, eventually, all cases are likely to be variants, according to Interior Health’s chief medical health officer Dr. Albert de Villiers. “From what we’ve heard from the United Kingdom and other countries is, eventually the variants will take over,” he said during a news briefing today, April 1. “It will be more...

Image Credit: Submitted/Eric MacMillan April 01, 2021 - 7:30 AM Eric MacMillan had the misfortune of graduating from the University of Windsor in May 2020, some of the darkest days in the COVID-19 lockdown where he had no job to go to. He turned that unfortunate timing into a hobby that benefits residents in far away Kelowna who wonder what their downtown will look like once the almost-weekly barrage of high-rise tower announcements become reality. “There were no jobs for m...

(ROB MUNRO / iNFOnews.ca) March 17, 2021 - 7:00 AM If you’ve ever walked through the rows of eastern white cedars near Kelowna’s Guisachan house, you may have heard the faint clip-clop of horses and echoes of laughter that has long since faded away. It harkens back to the 1890s and is one of this area’s only ghost stories — a happy enough one, for the record. On the heels of the City of Kelownas announcement that contractors and parks staff had begun removing the east...

March 16, 2021 - 1:00 PM Elementary school teachers in B.C. are three times more likely to get COVID-19 as high school teachers, according the B.C. School Teachers’ Federation. Based on WorkSafeBC data as of March 11, 80 claims had been approved for Kindergarten to Grade 7 teachers versus 25 for those teaching Grades 8 to 12, a B.C. Teachers’ Federation news release states. Since then, 31 more claims have been filed. “The discrepancy in infection rates truly underscores...

(CHARLOTTE HELSTON / iNFOnews.ca) March 15, 2021 - 6:00 AM Every year Shaun Reimer fights an increasingly difficult battle to find the perfect balance between Okanagan Lake flooding or falling into drought mode. But it’s likely to take at least five years before the Ministry of Forest’s section head for public safety in the Okanagan stands a chance of getting any significant help. That’s because it’s expected to take that long for the Okanagan Basin Water Board and th...

COVID-19 case counts are going up but hospitalizations and deaths are declining in the seven-day rolling average.

“What we see is, the work that we did in British Columbia, together, to try to protect people from this virus, meant that we had a slight increase in people who have died in our all-cause mortality in this province."

Interior Health is working with staff at Cottonwoods, the site of a COVID-19 outbreak, to encourage them to vaccinate now that more is known about the vaccine.

(ROB MUNRO / iNFOnews.ca) March 11, 2021 - 3:18 PM Everyone remembers 9/11, that day on Sept. 11, 2001 when planes flew into the World Trade Centre in New York, killing close to 3,000 people and starting the War on Terror. But,an equally poignant date that has not yet caught the public imagination is 3/11. That’s March 11, 2020 when the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus – now better known as COVID-19 or just COVID – to be a world pandemic. That wa...