Mitigation Measures
The province has announced that universities and colleges are going back to in-person in the fall.
Vaccine Clinics
Fraser Health has said you can walk in to any of their clinics for your first dose. I heard from someone that VCH — or at least the West End Community Clinic — is doing walk-ins for first doses also. They actually said that they’d do walk-ins for second doses as well (but maybe they really meant “if we’re not busy”) if you are more than 8 weeks past your first dose.
BC is currently vaccinating at about 57K shots/day, while our max day was about 82K.
Someone asked me today if we aren’t vaccinating as fast as we could because we just don’t have enough arms which are past 8 weeks. I looked it up, and no. Eight weeks ago was 10 May; on that day, we’d given 2,053,045 first doses. As of today, we’ve given 1,669,330 second doses. So there’s 383,715 arms we could put shots into today.
Counting
As I mentioned in the 29 June 2021 General blog posting, there’s a study which says that COVID deaths in Canada have been massively under-reported. tl;dr: I don’t see any major flaws in the study. I think it says that ~28% of COVID-19 deaths are listed as being COVID-19.
The three basic arguments that the report makes are:
- the ratio of excess deaths to reported COVID-19 deaths is higher than in peer countries,
- the ratio of COVID-19 deaths in long-term care homes (LTCH) to all reported COVID-19 deaths is lower than in peer countries, and
- case increases lagged growth of excess deaths until mid-October 2020.
The report said that they thought that only 45% of deaths should be in LTCH, and half of the non-LTCH deaths were missing. I think that means that 55%/2 or 27.5% of deaths are missing, which means instead of 1,363 COVID-19 deaths in BC to date, there were really ~1880 deaths in BC.
I don’t feel expert enough on other provinces to comment, so I only looked at BC.
I didn’t see anything glaringly wrong. I’m not sure why the US CDC method of calculating excess deaths is better than the StatsCan one, but I’m willing to believe it is. They put a lot of weight on Quebec attributing all deaths properly, while it’s possible that Quebec was trigger-happy on calling everything COVID-19, or they really did have more COVID-19 excess deaths because of different lockdowns, different respect for government, or whatnot. They thought that every province’s LTCH situation should be similar, while I am happy to believe that different availability of PPE, different proportions of care workers who worked at multiple sites, etc. could have make really drastic differences.
Still, there was nothing that was obviously wrong, and they clearly did a careful and thorough job with defensible choices.
This article shows excess deaths and deaths due to COVID-19 (and this article on how they did their calculations) for many jurisdictions and is a useful counterpoint.
Seroprevalence
This study of seroprevalence was a bit vague, but said that by the end of Feb, between 5 and 6 percent of BCers had antibodies to COVID. If we say that 5.500% had antibodies, that would say that 280,500 people in BC had gotten COVID-19. On 1 March 2021, the official number was 80,672, which suggests that 2.5 times as many cases were not found as were found.
This is a much larger undercount than for deaths, and that makes sense. It’s common to have an asymptomatic case; it’s not possible to have an asymptomatic death. :-/
Statistics
Fri/Sat: +30 cases
Sat/Sun: +37 cases
Sun/Mon: +20 cases (yay!)
Over the weekend, an average per day of +1 death, +7,111 first doses, +47,539 second doses.
Currently 85 in hospital / 22 in ICU, 652 actives cases, 145,362 recovered.
| first doses | second doses | |
| of adults | not reported | not reported |
| of over-12s | 78.0% | 36.0% |
| of all BCers | 71.0% | 32.7% |
We have 1,080,746 doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 18.8 days at last week’s rate. We have given more doses than we’d received by 12 days ago.
We have 1,013,132 mRNA doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 17.6 days at last week’s rate. We have given more doses than we’d received by 12 days ago.
We have 67,614 AZ doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 79.0 days (!) at last week’s rate.
Charts
