BY PAMELA FAYERMAN

Nearly 75% of Canadians who’ve contracted COVID-19 (lab confirmed) have recovered.

That’s 71,266 individuals out of 98,235 who’ve survived COVID. Another 8,765 have died from it.

There are currently about 27,307 active, lab-confirmed cases across the country.

We hear public health experts and government officials talk about the number of recovered or resolved cases. What does that actually mean?  It doesn’t mean that individuals no longer have troubling, lingering symptoms; many do, for months, as this article from PBS shows.

The definition of recoveries is slightly different in each province. In B.C. public health workers in each regional health authority contact individuals who’ve tested positive and been advised to isolate (quarantine). The public health workers make contact either daily or “regularly” to determine when individuals can be released from isolation.

The monitoring criteria is based on advice from the BC Centre for Disease Control and it looks like this:

Alex Peaker, a BC ministry of health spokesman, said recoveries are essentially defined as the end of self-isolation (quarantine) orders.

Isolation is discontinued after:

• Resolution of fever without the use of fever-reducing medications and

• There is an improvement of symptoms (respiratory, gastrointestinal and systemic) and

• Either two negative nasopharyngeal swabs have been collected at least 24 hours apart, or at least 10 days have passed since the onset of symptoms.

As mentioned earlier, recoveries are defined slightly differently in each province. Alberta Health says a recovered case is defined as:

• Anyone who is healthy after 14 days have passed, if they did not experience severe symptoms requiring hospitalization.

• Anyone who has gone 10 days from their date of discharge from hospital, if they did require hospitalization.

• Anyone who has received two negative tests, at least 24 hours apart.