Vaccines
This article slags the province for throwing away expired AZ doses.
This really surprised me. I watch the supply carefully, noting when we got how many doses of which vaccine, and I don’t think we have much expiring.
BC has used 64K less than they have received. The expiry date is either six or seven months after manufacture. (AstraZeneca changed the expiry period in May or June, but if a lot was labelled before the change, there is some bureaucracy which needs to happen for us to be legally allowed to use that lot.) Here are the the most recent 133K doses:
| Date | Amount | Probable labelled expiry |
| 2021-05-19 | 88900 | 2021-11-19 |
| 2021-06-16 | 34100 | 2022-01-16 |
| 2021-06-24 | 10000 | 2022-01-24 |
In late May, Canada did the bureaucracy to extend the shelf life of two batches by one month, from May 31, 2021, to July 1, 2021. At about that time, Dr. Henry said that this did not affect BC because BC’s vax expired at the end of June. I believe that was from a shipment which the USA loaned to Canada which arrived on 1 April — that shipment had a shorter shelf life because it had sat on the US’ shelves for a while.
However, if we are giving shots on a first-in-first-out basis, all the US shipment should have all been used by now. (And if it had not been, BC should have been able to extend the expiry date by a month.)
Now, there was a scramble to use up some AZ which expired on 1 April (I believe from the US batch). This was complicated by Health Canada suspending the use of AZ in people under 55 on 29 March. I believe that a small amount was thrown away then, but I think it was like fifty or one hundred doses, not ten thousand. You also must admit those were rather unusual circumstances.
One thing that the above article said was that there is no procedure for provinces to send back vaccines which they don’t want. This makes me wonder if the 1,116,320 Moderna doses actually arrived in Canada but BC told the feds, “no, you hang on to it for us”. The federal vaccine supply page says that there are 2,631,008 doses in reserve with the feds.
That looks likely: the federal vaccine supply page says that Ontario has gotten 2.86x as much Pfizer as BC has, with a population that is (surprise!) 2.86x as large as BC’s. However, Ontario has gotten 3.91x as much Moderna as BC has.
Variants
The variant report for the week ending 3 July is out, and the proportion of Delta cases went down, which is awesome. I hope it’s because Public Health is hammering on Delta cases: doing forwards tracing, backwards tracing, vaccinating anybody who came within six blocks of any infected person, etc.
It is encouraging that the Delta percentage went down, but note that the collection week ended just two days after our restrictions were lifted. Another oddness is that ALL of the VOCs percentages dropped, which implies that COVID Classic increased its percentage? That’s possible, but seems odd.
Maybe the province’s data is just borked? Sadly, that’s a genuine possibility.
Mitigation Measures
Today, they started tearing down the emergency overflow capacity site at the Vancouver Convention Centre. Fortunately, they never had to use it. (This article says there were 271 surge beds there.)
I sure hope we don’t need it in a few months!
Statistics
Today: +33 cases, +0 deaths, +5,857 first doses, +57,993 second doses (+301 AZ). Note that this is FIVE days in a row without a death!!!!
Currently 66 in hospital / 14 in ICU, 639 active cases, 145,775 recovered.
| first doses | second doses | |
| of adults | 80.2% | 49.1% |
| of over-12s | 79.1% | 46.0% |
| of all BCers | 72.0% | 41.8% |
We have 900,879 doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 15.5 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more doses than we’d received by 15 days ago.
We have 836,570 mRNA doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 12.6 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more mRNA doses than we’d received by 15 days ago.
We have 64,309 AZ doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 153 days at last week’s rate.
Charts
