2021-09-25/26/27 BC – COVID-19 in British Columbia

Mitigation Measures

Apparently there has been a cap, instituted because COVID-19, on the fees that delivery services are allowed to charge restaurants: 15% on deliveries and 5% on related administration (like web sites, credit card processing, etc.) The province has now extended that cap until 31 Dec.

The dude who got busted for setting up an illegal nightclub in his penthouse? The police are now trying to seize the penthouse with civil asset forfeiture. (The guy sounds like scum, but IMHO civil asset forfeitures are evil evil evil.)

This article says that the BC Human Rights Tribunal is swamped with complaints about mitigation measures like masking and vax passports. People don’t realize that “discrimination” for the BC Human Rights Tribunal is strictly for immutable personal characteristics (like skin colour) and not for behaviours.

As this article reminds us, starting today, we can’t use our vaccine wallet cards. We need to use the app-based vaccination card (or a printout of it).

This article says that the Vancouver school district has mandated masks for all students.

This article says that a pharmacy in New West was reusing syringes (the barrel part, not the needle part). (The pharmacist got fired and the pharmacy got kicked out of the vax program.)

Testing

This article says that there has been a big increase in testing in BC recently – 18,007 last week vs. ~5000/week last year. We are having a lot more contacts, and haven’t had common colds (rhinoviruses, enteroviruses, RSV, adenoviruses, etc.) for 16 months, so many people are catching colds. Colds have the same symptoms as COVID-19, so lots of people are getting tested.

NB: It’s time for me to plug Live Attenuated Virus (LAV) vaccines again. After you get an infection, your innate immune system revs up a bit, but that’s only temporary. I don’t know if it is six months, a year, or what, but it seems like it’s less than 16 months (because everybody is getting sick!). You can cheat and rev up your innate immune system with a LAV vaccine: Measles/Mumps/Rubella, Tetanus/diphtheria/pertussis, tuberculosis, and a few others. If you want to give yourself a little extra boost, go get one of those. (It’ll be difficult to talk your provider into getting an MMR, slightly less hard for TB, but for most people, it should be easy to get a tetanus shot: you’re supposed to get one every ten years, but most people are overdue.)

If you have kids under 5 or under 18 under specific circumstances, they can get an LAV flu vax and bonus!, it’s a nasal vaccine, so it will boost the innate immune system of the respiratory tract — which is important in fending off SARS-CoV-2 before it can turn into COVID-19.