2021-03-18 BC – COVID-19 in British Columbia

Dr. Henry, Dr. Ballem, Adrian Dix, and John Horgan gave a briefing today (press release, video, slides).

Occupation-based track

Dr. H said that the first tranche of AZ has mostly been going to mobile vax clinics, but sometimes the workers have been using the same clinics as the age-based clinics but with a separate flow.

They talked a little about how we were also going to get a TON of vax in late March / mid-April. There’s about a half million more doses coming late March / mid-April than they were expecting.

Of that, there’s going to be ~200k doses of AZ coming by mid-April (with 68K in May). We might even get more than that, as the USA said it will ship us some of their AZ stockpile soon (which would work out to around 200K doses for BC). Here’s who will be eligible for the next tranche of AZ vaccines in the occupation-based vaccination track.:

first responders (police, firefighters, emergency transport);
K-12 educational staff;
child care staff;
grocery store workers;
postal workers;
bylaw and quarantine officers;
manufacturing workers;
wholesale/warehousing employees;
staff living in congregate housing at places such as ski hills;
correctional facilities staff; and
cross-border transport staff.

Age cohort track

Because we’re getting SO MUCH vax in the next month, they are accelerating the age-cohort-schedule. They didn’t give exact dates, just the month, but this is what I infer they meant:

Age	Vaccinations starting
75+	April 5
70+	April 12
65+	April 19
slop	April 26
60+	May 3
55+	May 10
50+	May 17
45+	May 24
slop	May 31
40+	June 7
35+	June 14
30+	June 21
25+	June 27
18+	June 27

I think they are sandbagging. I think we don’t need those two weeks of slop, and I think the 75+ are going to get vaccinated more like 29 March. They have already announced that 79 year-olds are going to make bookings starting on March 20! (Vaccinations generally start a week after bookings.)

Staffing

Someone asked if we had enough staff and where we were going to get all the staff. Dr. H and Dr. B did not answer the question “do we have enough” explicitly, but hopefully the non-answer means “yes”. Dr.H mentioned that she’d put in an order which expanded the number of people who could vaccinate.

Dr.B said something about how they had partnered with organizations — I had the impression non-profits and other public benefit organizations — whose people were not able to do their normal work due to the pandemic, and kind of slurped them up wholesale.

I can imagine groups like the Neighbourhood Emergency Assistance Team or VolunteerBC being easy to draw upon.

Bookings

Yesterday, I said that it was embarrassing that Interior Health had more bookings than Vancouver Coastal Health, because surely there weren’t more old people in IH than VCH!

Today, one of the slides they put up showed the number of people who would be vaccinated in age-based clinics in each Health Authority by mid-April (roughly, the 65-80 year olds), and they showed:

Fraser: 136,669
Vancouver Island: 91,369
Vancouver Coastal: 88,334
Interior: 85,628
Northern: 19,567

So VIHA and FHA both have more seniors than VCH, and Interior has almost as many.

Yes, this is the 65-80 year-olds, and the proportions might be different for the 80+ year-olds (which is who has booked so far)… but I suspect that if the proportions are different, the 80+ crowd would skew even higher in FHA, VIHA, and IHA: whatever draws retirees to FHA/VIHA/IHA from VCH for the early retirees is probably even more of a draw for the older retirees.