Supply
I want to point out that it’s now been almost a month since Novavax finished its Phase 3 trials in the UK, and it’s been taking about a month between Ph3 and approval. Novavax looks like a fine vax, is fridge-stable, we’ve ordered 76M doses, and no other country has approved it. They have already started manufacturing (their test results were quite good), and if Canada approves first, maybe we could get a large initial shipment. 🙂
VOCs
I have seen a number of breathless articles saying that BC is now the biggest P.1 hotspot outside of Brazil. I think that’s bullshit. Yes, we have a P.1 problem here, but P.1 isn’t even our dominant strain here (yet). The reason BC has more known cases of P.1 than anywhere else IS BECAUSE WE ARE DOING BETTER TESTING FOR IT THAN ANYONE ELSE. I am absolutely certain that there is a lot of P.1 elsewhere (*cough* Ecuador *cough* Michigan *cough*) that people just don’t know about.
Vaccine Clinics
Tomorrow, BC is launching its online reservation system. That’s a week ahead of schedule, and I think that’s good news. If I (a very experienced software developer) were going to launch a service which needed to scale, there is no way I would launch it early if I had any concerns about its ability to scale. 👍! On the other hand, BC has ah not exactly ah inspired confidence with its technology prowess. 😞
Measures
Over the weekend, two restaurants stayed open in defiance of the pub health orders. Inspectors went to close them down, but the restaurants still didn’t. The police showed up, but did not close them down, which makes me wonder who has what authority to force people to comply. (Note that the police did arrest a guy who was running a nightclub in his penthouse.)
Some churches also held in-person services on Easter.
Today, the city of Vancouver yanked the restaurants’ business licenses. I don’t know what punishment, if any, the churches will face.
Hockey
The Canucks now have 17 players on their active roster (of 22 total) down with COVID or isolating due to exposure. That doesn’t include staff or the taxi squad.
While this obviously sucks, I am hoping that there will be a silver lining that people will recognize that this is not like the flu and that being young and robust does not make you impervious to the virus. 🙁
Statistics
The data reporting was kind of skimpy over the weekend, and they revised the case counts for Friday and Saturday slightly. Here are the final case counts:
- Thu/Fri: +1,074
- Fri/Sat: +1,077
- Sat/Sun: +999
- Sun/Mon: +890
(A word of caution: it looks like the case count is dropping, but that might just be because not as many people went to get tested over the long weekend. It’s common for the Sunday figures to be low.)
Thursday to Monday: +23 deaths.
Saturday to Monday: +36,772 first doses, +17 second doses. (Note: 19.2% of BC adults have now been vaccinated, yay!)
Currently 318 in hospital / 96 in ICU, 8,490 active cases, 11,989 under monitoring, 94,806 recovered.
Saturday to Monday VOCs: +557 of B.1.1.7, +1 of B.1.351, +358 of P.1.
Note: I have heard through unofficial channels (and unsubstantiated) that they are now doing whole-genome sequencing on only about 25% of their suspicious positive tests. So who knows if those stats are even meaningful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Charts
Note: the dashboard where I get the vaccine supply information hasn’t been updated since Thursday, so I can’t give you the vaccine supply charts.