Eligibility
Pregnant people are now eligible to get vaccinated!
And grocery workers in VCH and Fraser Health!
Vaxxing the kids
As I mentioned, the US FDA is going to approve Pfizer for 12-15 y/os next week, and Canada usually approves at about the same time as the US.
How are we going to vaccinate them? In the high schools or at mass vax clinics?
The advantage of vaccinating the kids in schools is that they are a captive audience: you know where they are with pretty great precision. If you wait until after school, then the parents have the hassle of needing to accompany them to a clinic (maybe trailing younger siblings along with them). Also, many people will want to travel the minute they are in the slightest bit able to, which would delay their vaccination.
On the other hand, if you want to vaccinate in schools, then you need to deal with permission slips and teens remembering to bring their CareCards.
If you vaccinate the teens in schools, then you can do that in parallel with the mass vax clinics, so you don’t have to slow them down.
(The calculation that we have enough doses to do the teens in parallel: from the way Dr. Henry and Minister Dix talk about things, BC clearly has decided to budget a fixed 85% of the doses to the age-based track and 15% to “everything else”: hotspots, teachers, grocery workers, etc.. There are ~268K children enrolled in grades 7-12. If the authorization comes on 14 May, that gives 6.5 weeks to vaccinate all of grades 7-12, and 15% of the Pfizer deliveries in those 6.5 weeks works out to 328K doses — enough that BC could spend its “everything else” doses on the teens with 60K to spare.)
If we vaccinate the teens as part of the mass vax clinics, then vaccinating the 268K teens slows down second doses by approximately one week, maybe less.
Second doses
At yesterday’s press briefing, Dr. Henry said she thought we would get our second doses earlier than four months. So when are we likely to get our second doses?
I had thought that it would depend mostly on how/when we vaccinated the teens, but (see above), the teens are not a huge factor.
A much bigger factor is how many people decline to get a vaccination. Canada will probably be somewhere between the US and the UK in terms of vaccine hostility. I made some scientific wild-ass guesses for somewhere in between and think that we’ve got 994K more people who will get a first dose.
994K is… not many compared to the amount of vax coming in. We could be done with 994K by Victoria Day (plus a week if we vaccinate the teens). If instead, 100% of the adult population gets vaccinated, we’ll be done by the middle of June (plus a week for the teens).
This assumes, of course, that we can get shots into arms as fast as we get doses in the door (with a one-week buffer). Dix keeps assuring us that we can!
Remember, we can’t vaccinate everyone on the day we start vaccinating. If my SWAG of how many will get a vaccination is correct, it will only take ten weeks to get everyone their second dose. If EVERYONE gets a second dose, then it will take 16 weeks (plus a week for the teens).
That means that the earliest that we finish giving every adult their second dose will probably be the beginning of August; the latest (if EVERYONE gets a second dose and we vaccinate the teens) will be the beginning of October.
It could even go faster if Moderna gets their act together and gives us as much vax as they were supposed to get to us. Whoohoo!
Statistics
+697 cases, +1 death, +32,319 first doses, +513 second doses (including +2675 AZ).
Currently 486 in hospital / 173 in ICU, 7,161 active cases, 10,961 under monitoring, 123,383 recovered.
We’ve got 332,898 doses in the fridges, which we’ll use in 9.7 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more doses than we had received by 8 days ago.
We have 276,603 mRNA doses, which we’ll use in 10.0 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more mRNA doses than we’d received by 7 days ago.
We have 56,295 doses of AZ, which we’ll use in 8.8 days at last week’s rate.
Charts
I don’t know how often the province will publish these numbers.
