2021-05-10 BC – Pandemics in British Columbia

Vaccine Clinics

I missed it on 6 May, but restaurant workers over 18 can now get immunized on the occupation track.

Everyone over 18 who lives in a hotspot can now get a vax!

Press Briefing

In addition to the stats (see below), Dr. Henry said:

Regarding the data leak, the primary primary most important purpose of the data is to help pub health make decisions. As such, they distribute it widely [internally]. As we get data, a ton of people review it, and after it has been reviewed, we share it with the public. We also provide a slightly different set of data once per month in our modelling updates.
There are rules about privacy that they respect which mean that they cannot publish data at a level that is fine enough that you could figure things out about an individual. As the pandemic has progressed and we’ve gotten more data, we’ve been able to decrease the size of the reporting jurisdictions. We did that once before going from Health Authority to Local Health Area. We had been discussing dropping down to even smaller jurisdictions, and in fact on Wednesday I had authorized going down to Community Health Service Areas. We will be releasing data by CHSA on Wednesday. Some rural areas will still be by LHA instead of CHSA because there isn’t enough data to ensure privacy.
We wanted to have a whizzy app which would let you look at the data by age and sex also, but that didn’t get done, so it’ll be static images for now.
As we get vaccinated, it’s tempting to think ahead to the post-pandemic life, but we aren’t there yet, so plleeeeeeeaaase keep Doing The Things!

Dix said:

The data that got leaked was almost all data that is regularly published. Only four slides had data that wasn’t already public. (I can verify that is true.)
Hospitalizations are still too high. We are using 118 regular surge beds and 15 critical care surge beds.
We got a ton of vax last week from Pfizer and Moderna, we’re going to get another ton from them this week.
Tons of people have registered.
The feds have not released the J&J to us yet.
We still need to Do The Things!

Q&A

Reminder: I paraphrase heavily.

Q: With restaurant workers now getting vaccinated, does that mean we can go back to indoor dining soon? A: Hold your horses, we still have a lot of cases right now. Yeah, indoor dining is important both to get people paycheques but also as an important social gathering, but first things first.

Q: Why aren’t you letting restaurant workers under 18 get vaccinated? A: C’mon, they only approved Pfizer for teens a few days ago! (Welllllllll…. Pfizer was already approved for those over 16.) We’ll figure it out.

Q: Are you talking to Saskatchewan about their re-opening plan which is based on vaccination rates? Is BC going to do something like that? A: Of course I talk to them, all the provinces talk to each other all the time, I just talked to them yesterday on our regular Sunday call, but they didn’t tell us they were going to spring this on us. We’re not going to base it only on vax rate, we’ll probably look at a bunch of things including rolling seven-day average of case rate and death rate, hospitalization stats, etc. Remember our goals: 1. decrease mortality, 2. don’t overwhelm HC system, 3. minimize disruption. That’s what we will base our reopening on. Also note that if we open too fast, cases can explode, ooo, don’t want that. We need to be careful.

Q: Will BC release data on schools and daycares? A: Look, we don’t have the kind of data that you want. We can’t say, “this person infected that person” for every person. We have had some small outbreaks in childcare, which is why we prioritized childcare workers. And while we have been getting good uptake from schoolteachers, the uptake in childcare workers isn’t as high as we’d like, so CHILDCARE WORKERS, PLEASE GO GET VAXXED!

Q: The positivity rates are different in different places, can we do regional re-openings? A: No. We’ve tried region-based things twice, and they didn’t work. If we learn more, we can change, but what we’ve seen so far is that the virus travels with people when people travel, so you can’t do region-based restrictions. We’re going to do this together. (I am not sure what she’s referring to, but I bet what happens if you reduce restrictions in one place is that encourages people from high-cases/high-restrictions areas to low-cases/low-restrictions areas to do their things (e.g. have a wedding).)

Q: How are you going to make sure people get their second dose at 16 weeks? A: All the names are in the system. We don’t always have contact info in the system, but the people who are coming due soon were mostly in long-term care and First Nations communities, so we’re going back to those places. Also, we started to work on that in week 13 to make sure that we find them by week 16. It’s most efficient for us if you register, so GO REGISTER!

Q: Dix, you mortally wounded public trust by withholding data, how are you ever going to rebuild public trust? A: Oh come on, there were only four slides that had data we hadn’t yet released. We’ve given you data on all kinds of things when you asked, including long-term care home data, personal protective equipment data, surgical renewal data, etc. And we’ve given results by having our politicians stand back and let pub health run things: BC has a mortality rate that is HALF of the Canadian average and one of the best in Europe and North America for jurisdictions our size or bigger. We have learned and adapted and oh EVERYBODY GO REGISTER!

Q: 1.5M BCers have gotten a first vax (actually it’s >2M), when are they going to get updated guidance on what they can do, like can two people with one dose meet socially? A: No. Case counts are still too high. We’re going to get there soon — weeks not months — but we aren’t there yet.