2021-11-02 BC – COVID-19 in British Columbia

Mitigation Measures

This article does some calculations to say that not wearing a mask is like driving drunk five times. Yes, yes, it depends on all kinds of factors (how drunk? how far do you drive? what is the case rate in your city?), but the point is that not wearing a mask is the same order of magnitude of risk as driving drunk.

This article says that West Vancouver municipal employees need to be vaccinated before 11 Jan 2022.

This article says that the Surrey school district decided against a vaccine mandate.

Vaccines

This article says that a pharmacist who reused syringe barrels (but not needles) is facing a class-action lawsuit.

Press Briefing

Yesterday, there was a COVID-19 briefing which I had heard was going to be a briefing on the overdose crisis. Foo.

I captured the most important info from news articles, so it’s already in yesterday’s BC blog posting, but there were a few things that I thought were still interesting:

93% of the long term care homes have gotten their booster doses, the rest will be done this week.
Last week there were a few influenza A cases in BC. (Everybody get your flu shot!!)
Reminder that masks are required during faith services.
Indoor mask mandate extended indefinitely. (Sorry, I saw this yesterday but it didn’t register to me as news because I always wear me a mask indoors.)
Dix talked in excruciating boring detail about which hospitals had “reductions in operating rooms” (which I think means reductions in hours?) and why. For most of the hospitals he mentioned, the reductions were not due to lack of staff due to vaccine mandates, but because the staff had their hands full dealing with ICU patients.
33 more contact tracers have been hired, which means that BC has passed its third-wave high of contact tracers (now 1575).
The province has move 92 patients from NH to southern health authorities.
Dix stumbled a bit when saying how many surge ICU beds were in use, but I think he said 478, leaving 1875 available. So lots, but we have more still.
Yesterday, I puzzled at how almost 19% of the unvaxxed health care workers from last week are now vaccinated. While some of the HCW maybe discovered to their surprise that the province was not bluffing, there’s another possibility. DrH mentioned that in Northern Health (and maybe elsewhere? I’m not sure), they were talking one-on-one to unvaccinated staff to answer questions.
Dix gave info on what percentage of HCW were unvaxxed by HA:
- FH 2%
- NH 4%
- VCH 2%
- Interior Health 5%
- Providence Health 1%
- Island Health 2%
The positivity rate in the Interior has dropped from like 14-15% to like 5-6% since they put in restrictions.
A reporter asked if the Ministry should to move staff to outbreaks instead of patients to emptier hospitals. The answer was a little rambly, but I think the answer was that the health authorities are managing on their own, sometimes by moving staff around inside the health authority. I had the impression that he was conveying, “we don’t need to yet, and while we’re open to moving staff across HA lines, it’s a big deal so don’t want to do it lightly”.
A reporter asked why we were still getting LTCH outbreaks. DrH reminded the audience that “outbreak” was one or two people (IIRC, it’s one resident or two staff, something like that), and that most of the outbreaks were small. She also mentioned that in Collingwood (the most difficult and longest outbreak), there were issues with people getting moved into the facility who had not been vaccinated yet. Urk, that seems like a bug!
A reporter asked a hostile question which could be interpreted as “Yo, Henry, why weren’t you wearing a mask at the Canucks game?” and DrH wove into her answer that masks were not required when seated or eating at events.
Question: why are people with two doses of AZ going to get boosters earlier? Because we see some waning of protection against infection (though note against hospitalization is still strong). (Non-elderly/immunocompromised who got at least one mRNA appear to still be fine.) All the booster doses will be mRNA, though there are still some details to work out (do we use a half-dose of Moderna, for example, for the boosters?).