Press Briefing
I’m going to summarize the briefing tersely today.
The presentation section was them talking about the success of Walk-In Wednesday. Dix and Henry looked happy.
If you look at the numbers, the numbers don’t actually look that great. Sure, 8K is better than 4K in relative terms, but it’s not that much in absolute terms. It might be, however, that the type of person who walked in was different than the type of person who doesn’t. Dix seemed to indicate that the walk-ins were a younger cohort than the scheduled, for example.
In response to questions:
- Dr. Henry seemed to think that cases are adequately under control. She said that we weren’t seeing uncontrolled spread to our most vulnerable (i.e. elderly) in part because of the high vax rate among seniors. It doesn’t look like they expect to put in any broad measures, but she reminded us that they have targeted mitigation measures, for example mitigation measures in the Central Okanagan. I think I remember those including a mask mandate, travel advisory. She mentioned that the minimum dose interval is four weeks in the Central Okanagan.
- She said that she wanted to make sure that people weren’t denied access to essential services based on their vax status, but that there were certain areas (e.g. health care) where it was important to protect everybody. Dix chimed in and said that you are not obliged to get vaxxed, but you have to understand that there are consequences if you don’t. He also pointed out that if you want to travel at all (“to Blaine, Bellingham, Belgium, or Botswana”), you’ll need a vaccine passport. They said that they are working hard to make sure that it was easy for people to access their own health record (to make it easy to retrieve their vax info).
- Dr.H reminded reporters that the three goals were to reduce sickness and death, keep the healthcare system from collapsing, and minimize societal disruptions, and that the societal disruptions of mitigation measures were severe. “There’s no dichotomy between the economy and health”. She didn’t say explicitly, “it’s time to get back to our lives”, but I kind of got that impression.
- She mentioned that there was higher non-COVID demand for hospital beds, probably because of treatments which were delayed due to COVID.
- Dix and Henry of course hammered on how important it was for everybody to get vaccinated.
Statistics
+402 cases, +0 deaths, +7,623 first doses, +25,624 second doses.
Currently 58 in hospital / 21 in ICU, 2,066 active cases, 147,510 recovered.
| first doses | second doses | |
| of adults | 82.6% | 70.6% |
| of over-12s | 81.7% | 68.4% |
| of all BCers | 74.3% | 62.2% |
We have 692,418 doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 20.8 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more doses than we’d received by 16 days ago.
We have 647,834 mRNA doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 19.5 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more mRNA doses than we’d received by 16 days ago.
83.7% of the people who have gotten a first dose have gotten a second dose.
91.4% of the people who had gotten a first dose 49 days ago have gotten a second dose.
Charts
