Press Briefing
There was a surprise briefing which I did not watch. Mostly it was on new mitigation measures for the Northern Health Authority:
- Personal gatherings in your home – one additional family or 5 guests
- Personal gatherings outside your home – maximum 50 people
- Indoor events – have a safety plan (the organizer should have a safety plan, but is not required to submit one for approval)
- Outside events – when more than 200 people, then have a safety plan
- Sporting events with spectators, indoor & outdoor – have a safety plan
The questions brought up a few things which I learned from Twitter, mostly from Justin McElroy and Richard Zussman:
- Fast food restaurants will not be covered by the mask mandate. (?!?)
- Base bed occupancy is 94.4% across the province and surge bed occupancy is around 12%.
- Condos and apartments are NOT included in the mask mandate, but the province strongly recommends that masks are worn in common spaces in housing complexes.
Mitigation Measures
This paper says that the filtration efficiency for 0.3 μm particles was:
- 83-99% for N95 and KN95 respirators,
- 42-88% for surgical masks,
- 16-23% for cloth masks, and
- 9% for bandanas.
It also said that you could in fact wash cloth masks many times without degrading filtration, and that putting a cloth mask over a surgical mask improved filtration by about 25%.
UBC will require regular testing of students who are not fully vaxxed. That sounds a bit to me like a vax mandate without calling it a vax mandate.
Statistics
+801 cases, +6 deaths, +7,044 first doses, +8,208 second doses.
Currently 199 in hospital / 116 in ICU, 5,931 active cases.
| first doses | second doses | |
| of adults | 85.3% | 77.9% |
| of over-12s | 84.6% | 76.9% |
| of all BCers | 77.0% | 69.9% |
Charts
This Twitter thread points out that the places outside of the Interior with the worst vaccination rates are in the North, and three local health areas with the highest case rates are in the North. Funny, that.
