COVID-19 Variants 🦠🧬 NB.1.8.1 is still causing a lot of cases in Asia and Australia. It has acquired two nicknames: “NimBus” (from the two letters in its designation) and “Razor Blade Throat” because it apparently feels like you’ve been swallowing razor blades. Long COVID 🩸‼️ This preprint using UK participants (2025-05-26) has a potential explanation… Continue reading 2025-06-01 General
Category: Testing
2024-10-18 BC
The number of people in hospital with COVID-19 has unmistakenly gone up since August, and there is a small but very real rise in the number of COVID-19 cases that they have seen. Positivity, however, hasn’t really moved all that much (and wastewater is hard to interpret), so I don’t know what to tell you… Continue reading 2024-10-18 BC
2024-05-10 BC
Reminder: the province has gone to once-per-month COVID reporting. Testing This paper examined multiple commercial RATs. For the ones available in BC (at least, which were available in BC), the Panbio (dark blue box, but NOT the Artron) was not very sensitive; BTNX Cassette was one of the best but BTNX was one of the… Continue reading 2024-05-10 BC
2023-09-08 BC
COVID-19 cases are increasing, by pretty much every measure. Statistics As of Sept 7, the BC CDC situation report says that in the week ending on 2 Sept there were: +447 reported cases, +119 hospital admissions, +17 ICU admissions, +12 thirty-day all-cause deaths*. In the week ending 26 Aug, there were: +366 reported cases, +136… Continue reading 2023-09-08 BC
2023-01-06 BC small
Wastewater From Jeff’s spreadsheet, with data from MetroVan through 2 Jan: There’s so much noise, it’s hard to tell if the amount of COVID-19 in the wastewater is going up or going down. Non-COVID Respiratory Illnesses I might not do any more reporting on non-COVID respiratory illnesses. The levels of illness are dropping pretty fast,… Continue reading 2023-01-06 BC small
2023-01-05 BC
Pub Health Advice This tweet thread says that the BC CDC web site changed from masking being a personal choice, to “Public health recommends wearing masks in all public indoor spaces”, back to personal choice, all in the space of not very much time. Hmmm. Sounds like there is some internal politics going on there.… Continue reading 2023-01-05 BC
2022-07-01 BC tiny
Happy Canada Day! Charts COVID-19 levels in wastewater, from my buddy Jeff: Variant chart from the BC CDC variants page:
2022-05-27 BC tiny
Testing Here’s this week’s wastewater charts, from my buddy Jeff’s spreadsheet: Fraser is now clearly going down. Vancouver might be going up, but that might just be noise. North Shore, Richmond, and Langley are looking stable. Note that while the levels are declining, they still aren’t good. They are still two or three times what… Continue reading 2022-05-27 BC tiny
2022-05-20 BC tiny
The federal vaccination by age over time chart is now getting updated every other week, so you only get the wastewater chart. Why do I make a post that is so small? Because wastewater data — noisy as it is — is one of the most meaningful data sources which we have. The case data… Continue reading 2022-05-20 BC tiny
2022-05-13 BC tiny
I present to you the Friday charts. Charts From my buddy Jeff’s wastewater spreadsheet: From the federal vaccination page (they are updating every two weeks now):