As a media organization, CICK News receives "tips" from time to time which can lead to interesting interviews, breaking a story, or sometimes a dead-end.

CICK News received a tip last week that the area of Burns Lake (a small community of about 2,000 people along Highway 16 in the Lakes District of northern BC) was suffering a "COVID outbreak."

This source (who wishes to remain unnamed) is a healthcare professional who urged their family not to visit Burns Lake.

We followed up this lead by contacting the Mayor of Burns Lake (no response by the time this story aired) as well as Northern Health, northern BC's publicly funded healthcare provider to find out if this tip "held water."

CICK News spoke to a public health professional, Dr. Raina Fumerton, to inquire about this lead. While Fumerton said she needed to retrieve data to comment on Burns Lake specifically, this is the information we were later sent in an email from Northern Health's Regional Manager of Public Affairs and Media Relations:

The Average Daily Case rate map on the BCCDC Surveillance Dashboard (click on the map tab, and select Case Rate as the Metric from the drop-down), shows that between August 17-23, the rate was in the 0-5 range (2, specifically).

The Cases by Local Health Area map, for the most recent 7-day period (Sunday to Saturday) shows there was on lab-confirmed case in the Burns Lake LHA between August 15 and 21 – that map will be updated on Wednesday of next week.

CICK News asked Fumerton how listeners are supposed to wade through pandemic data and understand the terminology.

"The definition that public health in British Columbia uses [in general] is when we have a group of people who have the illness in question that are all linked to each other so that we can track down [...] the story that ties all of those people together," Fumerton said.

"Uncontrolled spread, where we (public health officials) can't keep up, usually we keep the term "outbreak" to a closed setting such as a long-term care facility," she went on to say.