2021-04-14 BC

Vaccinations

The province did a whole-of-community vaccination of Prince Rupert, and we can now see the results: that vaccinations work! Here’s a graph that Justin McElroy made:

Note that the line hasn’t even bottomed out.

This reminds me of a graph Dr. Henry showed in 11 March 2021 presentation which showed that it took about three weeks before cases plateaued:

We’ve been telling each other, “wait two weeks”, but I think we should be saying, “wait three weeks”.

On a related note, I’ve heard people wondering who is dying now, given that we’ve done so much vaccination. Let’s do some math. This article says that onset-to-death is about 19 days. (I have seen articles which say its highly variable, from 14-56 days, but let’s assume 19 days.) Let’s assume that you get 100% of your vaccine immunity after exactly two weeks (which, from above, is probably optimistic). In that case, if you get vaccinated on Day 0, you can catch COVID on Day 13, and you will die 19 days later on Day 32. In other words, it takes a whole month after you vaccinate cohort X before you see a drop in cohort X’s death rate, at which point it will drop to zero.

Obviously this is a slight exaggeration — we’d start to see a bit of a drop before Day 32, but not everybody in cohort X will get vaccinated on the first day, and some people will take longer to reach their max immunity after one shot, some people will take longer to die, etc. However, the basic idea holds: don’t expect to see a big drop for at least a month.

For a reality check, we didn’t start vaccinating 90+ seniors living in the community until 15 March, which is one day less than one month ago.


The Surrey school district staff got vaccinated recently; the Vancouver School district gets its turn starting on Friday.

Mitigation Measures

On April 8, Dr. Henry issued an Order in place allowing WorkSafeBC to close businesses for ten days if they had an outbreak involving more than three people. That Order went into effect on Monday, and WorkSafeBC has indeed been closing places.

Statistics

+1,168 cases, +6 deaths, +41,804 first doses, +35 second doses. BC Public Health has given at least one dose to 26.2% of the eligible adults.

Currently 397 in hospital / 120 ICU, 9,821 active cases, 16,304 under monitoring, 103,360 recovered.

There wasn’t any info today on AZ doses or VOCs.

There are currently 307,598 doses in the fridges, which we’ll use in 7.35 days at today’s rate.  We have administered more doses than we had received by 11 days ago.

Charts