2021-11-04 BC – COVID-19 in British Columbia

Karma

This article says that Mak Parhar, a literal flat-earther and COVID-denier has died. While the official cause of death has not been determined blah blah, he had recently complained of symptoms which sure looked similar to COVID-19 symptoms.

Press Briefing

Today there was a briefing on modelling (slides, video). Briefly, because I am bored and tired, it was good news. Cases are trending down slowly but definitely, kind of across the board in all ages and Health Authorities. Hospitalizations are still high, but they are a lagging indicator; it will be a while before we see hospitalizations come down.

There are ~9200 non-ICU hospital beds out of ~9K base beds and ~2K surge beds, so we are coping, but it’s not evenly distributed. 100 people from NH have now been airlifted south. There were about 400 ICU beds occupied out of ~500 base ICU beds and ~200 surge ICU beds. Again; it’s very full but still (barely?) manageable.

Vaccination rates are still creeping up. Some unvaxxed health care workers are getting vaccinated; about 2% are still unvaccinated. This happened with care home staff as well; on the mandate day, 90.1% were unvaccinated; now 96.5% of that number are vaccinated. (100% of the people actually working are vaccinated.)

Booster doses have been offered to 98% of the long-term care/assisted living staff, and they will finish this week.

One of the questioners asked who t f was still dying if everyone was still vaxxed, a question which I have been having. DrH said that even with vax and boosters, older people still don’t have very good immune systems, and as you get older, you get more comorbidities. She emphasized that everyone AROUND the seniors and elders needs to get vaxxed to protect the seniors and elderly.

Someone said there had been anecdotes about inadequate flu shots. DrH and Minister Dix disputed that, saying that they had 2.4M doses, absolutely enough “for everyone”. (Note: the population is 5.1M, so they absolutely do NOT have enough for everyone. I think what they meant was “enough for everybody that wants one”.) I heard today that someone was having real trouble finding someplace to get a shot, so I bet that what is actually going on is that they don’t have enough people to vaccinate everybody immediately. (I think that is a good problem to have!)

There have now been four influenza cases this season, as opposed to zero wild flu cases last year. (There were about 20 cases last flu year from a live inactivated virus nasal vaccine given to kids.) Two of the cases were the B strain, one was A-H2N3 and one was A-H1N1. All of the cases were strains that are in this year’s flu shots.

There were multiple questions that were all, “why don’t you have a vax mandate for schools?” to which DrH didn’t exactly say, “look, that’s their decision not mine”, but it was close. She said that school districts needed to tailor their response to their specific conditions, that there wasn’t a lot of transmission in schools, and that there were very high vax rates in schools. She pointed out that healthcare was a very different occupation from teaching, and I can see that: school staff see the same people every day, and the vast majority of those people are unlikely to get very sick while health care providers see a lot of different people in very close quarters, many of whom are already sick.

Much as I am a fan of vaccination, I can see why a school might not want to put in a mandate. Imagine you’re a large school the only two people who aren’t vaxxed are the night janitors who don’t even see anyone else. Or imagine you’re in a very remote area and you have one teacher who is a staunch anti-vax and who already had COVID-19; you’d have to fire him, and until you could find someone to come to your remote location, the kids from his class would have to pack into Mrs. Grundy’s class, making things unsafe for Mrs. Grundy’s students.