B.C.’s top doctor says while passenger numbers at Vancouver International Airport are down to about 600 passengers a day, its hard to know if that number will increase as more people try to get home.

That is as there are still a few hundred-thousand Canadians abroad who have registered with Global Affairs Canada.

Dr. Bonnie Henry says international flights into Kelowna and Victoria will now be diverted to Vancouver to make it easier to manage the people coming in.

“The numbers have decreased. It was in the 2,000 to 3,000 people range over the last couple of weeks,” she said. “We’re also looking at land borders and the land crossings. We know that Canadians are still looking to come home and rightly so. This has been a challenging situation globally.”

On Wednesday, the province announced that people coming back to B.C. from abroad will have to fill out forms detailing their self-isolation plans.

“There’s a groundswell of many people in the U.S. for example wanting to get home as the crisis continues there so I suspect the numbers will fluctuate but I would not be surprised to see them increase, but I would not imagine that they would explode,” Henry added. “It’s still a challenging time for travel right now.”

Henry’s comments come three weeks after the federal government first announced restrictions on people entering Canada because of the coronavirus.

In Kamloops, a strong first quarter of the year for passenger volumes was also impacted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.