2021-08-11 BC

Statistics Today: +536 cases, +1 death, +4,010 first doses, +22,504 second doses. Currently 72 in hospital / 29 in ICU, 3,585 active cases, 148,446 people recovered. first doses second doses of adults 83.0% 72.9% of over-12s 82.2% 71.1% of all BCers 74.8% 64.7% We have 551,630 doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 21.2… Continue reading 2021-08-11 BC

2021-08-10 BC

Transmission This article says that Kelowna General Hospital is rescheduling some elective surgeries because they have so many COVID-19 patients. Statistics +395 cases, +0 deaths, +​​3,810 first doses, +16,188 second doses. Currently 71 in hospital / 23 in ICU, 3,284 active cases, 148,215 recovered. first doses second doses of adults 83.0% 72.5% of over-12s 82.1%… Continue reading 2021-08-10 BC

2021-08-10 General

Vaccines Sigh. Yesterday I showed a graph from Israel which looked a little funny, and repeated the explanations that were given. (BTW, I had heard before that Israel’s cases looked funny because the outbreak started in areas that were highly vaxxed and social separate from the unvaxxed places.) Today, one of the authors of the… Continue reading 2021-08-10 General

2021-08-09 BC

Press Briefing I didn’t actually watch the press briefing, but this tweet says that there wasn’t much news aside from that the province is now allowing a second dose at 4 weeks across the province. (They had shortened the interval in the Okanagan.) Mitigation Measures The Americans are coming! This article says that there was… Continue reading 2021-08-09 BC

2021-08-09 General

Transmission This study took COVID patients and counted the virus particles they emitted (well, RNA pieces). They found four interesting things: Being quiet keeps most of your viruses to yourself. A few people were more dangerous when talking than singing. Most of the viral load came from fine aerosol particles.  There was a huge variation… Continue reading 2021-08-09 General

2021-08-07/08 BC

Mitigation Measures This article says that many faculty at UBC are upset with the COVID plans for the fall. This article says that Pt. Roberts residents (and a few other exclaves) can enter Canada without the quarantine fuss.

2021-08-07/08 General

Vaccines This preprint says that getting a vaccine makes antibodies that you can detect in saliva (and I presume thus in the rest of the upper respiratory system). Recommended Reading This blog post does a very good job of explaining why we still need masks and distancing. Spoiler: fear the Delta strain. This Twitter thread… Continue reading 2021-08-07/08 General

2021-08-06 General

Vaccines Novavax is having such trouble manufacturing that the US has paused funding. This study looked at mixing and matching AZ and Pfizer. It found that side effects were similar for all the combinations. It found that AZ first then Pfizer was about the same as Pfizer+Pfizer in terms of antibodies; it found that AZ+Pfizer… Continue reading 2021-08-06 General

2021-08-06 BC

Press Briefing The briefing focused on mitigation measures for the Central Okanagan, where 60% of the province’s cases are. I want to know what we’re doing about the OTHER 40%, but I guess I have to wait. Of course, everybody emphasized that everybody needs to get vaccinated. DrH said that this is driven mostly by… Continue reading 2021-08-06 BC

2021-08-05 BC

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… Continue reading 2021-08-05 BC