You get a special two-for-one issue today because I uh was working on my taxes yesterday.
Statistics
Yesterday (Tuesday): +682 cases, +1 death, +18,093 first doses, +7 second doses, VOCs ID’d: +135 of B.1.1.7, 2 of B.1.351, 25 of P.1.
Today: +716 cases, +3 deaths, +25,126 first doses, +12 second doses, +22 of B.1.1.7, +1 of B.1.351, +30 of P.1.
Currently 303 in hospital / 85 in ICU, 5,573 active cases, 9,696 under monitoring, 86,857 recovered.
Daily Charts
Vaccinations
Jordan Tinney, the superintendent of Surrey Schools, sent email out to school staff telling them that they have been given approval to work with Fraser Health to vaccinate staff. I bet that made a lot of people happy.
The province is working with hospitality/tourism businesses to call in laid-off workers to staff vaccine clinics. I think this is awesome: that sector has been pummeled, there are a lot of people in that group, and those people are already trained at how to work with the public. Win-win-win!
Yesterday, Fraser Health announced some more mass vax clinic sites. They are not messing around! (That’s good, because Fraser Health has the most cases.) Five will open on the 29th (which is way earlier than 12 April!) and four more will open later. Here is Fraser Health’s full list.
VOCs
A lot of people have been handwringing about B.1.1.7, but based on the numbers which the province gives out every day, I’m not seeing explosive growth in B.1.1.7. Here’s what I see:
Caveats: we know the data is.. problematic. They run all the positive tests through a “quick” screening for VOCs which takes a day. All of those which match then get run through whole-genome sequencing, which takes 5-7 days, then report it in a press release. That means that it’s a lagging indicator, but if the process is stable and all samples take exactly N days, then we should see a good snapshot of what was happening N days ago, and it should be consistent. Conversely, if there is enormous variation in how many days it takes to report, then my graphs ain’t worth sh.. showing.
But it sure looks to me like B.1.1.7 is not the awful scary monster it has been most places. Someone asked, effectively “how could we be the only place in the world where B.1.1.7 is not exponential?” Well, we’re not: Florida also had the total case count plunge despite a huge amount of B.1.1.7.
Also note that it’s not that B.1.1.7 just doesn’t look scary because the number of cases is small: B.1.1.7 looks like it was about 25% of the cases a week ago.
B.1.351 does not seem to be playing a meaningful part in our numbers. A few cases come and go.
On the other hand, P.1 isn’t supposed to be as scary, but it does look like it’s exponential to me. There are a small number of cases in BC right now, but it’s increasing very rapidly. Here’s the same cumulative chart as above, but with B.1.1.7 taken out so it doesn’t throw the scales off:
Measures
Dr. Henry partially lifted the ban on religious services: they can be held outside now.