Note: It was hot again today, so today’s postings are going to be short. I’ll try to catch up in the next few days.
Mitigation Measures/Press Briefing
The headline today, the major, blinking, 72-point font headline is that BC has moved to Step 3 of the Restart Plan, which takes away most of the restrictions on day-to-day life. The border is still closed, masks are still recommended for unvaccinated people (and still might be mandatory in some businesses), and there are still some limitations on capacity in some places. However, there are no restrictions on personal gatherings, events can happen, gyms are open, etc. Life will basically be back to normal. Yiiiiippppppeeeee!!!!!
Other notes from the briefing, which Horgan was also at:
- Horgan just absolutely beamed when he saw press in the room. I think that was the first time he’d seen press in the briefing room in probably 16 months.
- Going forward, there will not be any more regular briefings. They have been doing eighteen frigging months of briefings, sometimes every day. They promised to distribute daily data on cases/hospitalizations/deaths, but were a bit vague on how. (My bet? They’ll just throw it up on the BC COVID-19 Dashboard without comment.)
- Dix mentioned that tomorrow’s immunization numbers will cross 5M doses given.
- They declared the Provincial State of Emergency over. (Or maybe it’s tomorrow, I forget. Soon.) The two Public Health Emergencies — COVID-19 and opioids — are still in effect.
- Yesterday was a record-breaking day for ambulance callouts with 1975. The previous record was the day before with ~1850; the previous record was on a New Year’s Eve at about 1830; before that it was another NYE; before that it was a pandemic non-heat day; before that it was another pandemic non-heat day. So two heat days, two NYEs, and two pandemic non-heat days.
- Dr. Henry was asked about a report which says that most of Canada has probably grossly undercounted COVID-19 deaths. She took a little bit of exception to that, saying that she worked with the Coroner’s Office so that early on in the pandemic, every single unexpected death got COVID-19 tested. She did say that there were a lot of pandemic-related deaths from people avoiding hospitals, but she didn’t think we were wickedly undercounting deaths.
- Someone asked again why people weren’t being given access to care home visitation, and also why restrictions hadn’t been lifted. The answer to the former has always been that care homes are supposed to allow visitations, and that’s a bug which should be reported; Dix blew off answering that. For the latter question, he pointed out that adding/removing mitigation measures in care homes doesn’t happen at the same time (and never has), but that there will be changes to visitation policy coming soon.
- I wish some reporter had asked why we are not vaxxing faster. Dix kept saying that we had plenty of capacity, if only we had the supply. Well, we have GOT supply now. We have over 1M doses on hand, with another 1M coming this week, and we’re only giving slightly more than we did when we were supply limited.
- A reporter asked Horgan if someone “was going to be held responsible” for all the heat deaths. I was appalled. That seemed inappropriate. I believe this was in part caused by rising CO2 levels, which it the result of BILLIONS of people making choices about car trips, campfires, breathing, wildfires, etc. It’s those billions of people who are responsible. In other words, all of us. There’s also only so much the province can do. (We don’t look for an individual to blame for drowning deaths or falls from ladders.)
- Horgan did pivot a question to talk about how important it was that we address climate change.
- Horgan took advantage of a question about “what are we going to do about heat” to talk about HVAC upgrades to schools that are being done as part of COVID-19 and the ongoing big capital upgrade to care facilities.
- I was actually slightly surprised that Dix and Horgan were wearing suit coats. It was strange for me, sweltering in my underclothes to see them so covered up. (No, I don’t think they should have been in their underwear, but I would have forgiven them for losing the coats.)
Statistics
Note: the case counts and vaccine numbers are probably depressed due to the heat: people stayed home instead of going out to get tested; some of the clinics might have been postponed.
Today: +29 cases, +0 deaths, +6,816 first doses, +48,270 second doses (of which 2317 were AZ).
Currently 110 in hospital / 34 in ICU, 876 active cases, 144,931 recovered.
| first dose | second dose | |
| of adults | 78.3% | 31.6% |
| of over-12s | 77.0% | 29.5% |
| of everybody | 77.4% | 30.5% |
We have 1,007,235 doses in fridges. (Yes, OVER ONE MILLION doses! 😲 And Moderna should deliver 1,054,900 doses this week. (They are already late on half of it.)) We’ll use it up in 16.4 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more doses than we’d received by 11 days ago.
We have 935,945 mRNA doses in fridges, which we’ll use up in 15.2 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more mRNA doses than we’d received by 11 days ago.
We have 71,290 AZ doses in fridges, which we’ll use up in 30.8 days at last week’s rate.
Charts
