Data Summary
A new BC CDC Data Summary was released yesterday.
Our death rates are surprisingly high, and I wondered who was dying. It’s vaccinated really old people:
Note that there aren’t very many unvaccinated old people.
Case counts in young children are going up:
They say that the cases started rising before school opened, and this chart does seem to validate that:
The case rate started going up before school started, but it’s gone up a lot afterwards. I am a hard time reconciling that. It went up the most post-schools opening in Northern Health, but has also gone up a little in Island Health and Fraser. In the other Health Authorities, it looks stable or falling.
You would expect that if schools were inherently dangerous, the rates would have gone up in all of the HAs. You’d expect that if they were inherently safe, there would be no difference after schools started. I think this means that it’s complicated.
Note that there is a lot more testing in kids right now, and I’m not sure why. You could say that this explains why the kids’ case rate went up, but you could also cynically say that means we must have been missing cases in kids when the case rate was lower.
They have results of a big study of vaccine effectiveness in BC using data from 30 May 2021 to 11 Sept 2021. (It looks like it hasn’t quite hit the prepress servers yet.) It shows that all of the vaccines are really really effective against hospitalization and death, and most combos are really effective against infection. AZ+AZ isn’t as good against infection as mRNA+mRNA or AZ+mRNA, but it’s still not awful.
I would like to say that I feel vindicated for my promotion of mixed vaccinations: AZ+mRNA is in fact better than two mRNAs!!! By, uh, a whopping 1%. <small voice> okay I will just go sit over in my corner over here </small voice>
While the effectiveness against infection decreases some over time, it’s still at 80% after 16 weeks, and against hospitalization is still over 90%:
The study also shows that longer dose1 to dose2 intervals are good. (This is not a surprise.) Fewer than six weeks, the effectiveness is in the mid-80s; more than six weeks it’s in the 90s.
The Weekly Summary says that the MetroVan wastewater COVID-19 levels were going down, which is great to see. Really, Langly is the only place where it is not obviously going down. The lines are cases and the circles are the COVID-19 wastewater levels:
Speaking of wastewater, NH’s positivity rate is in the shitter at a whopping 21%. That’s higher than it’s been anywhere at any time in the pandemic. On the other hand, Interior Health has made a very strong turnaround. Go Interior!
Mitigation Measures
According to this article, the Surrey school board has put in a mask mandate for all students, K-12. It also is going to try to get gargle COVID-19 tests into the schools.
Statistics
+813 cases, +11 deaths, +10,084 first doses (est), +8,917 second doses (est).
Currently 340 in hospital / 146 in ICU, 6,185 active cases, 177,729 recovered.
| first doses | second doses | |
| of adults | 88.4% | 81.6% |
| of over-12s | 87.9% | 80.8% |
| of all BCers | 80.1% | 73.5% |
Note that with the population of BC which I use (5.1M), more than 80% of all BCers have gotten a first dose! My records show that 98% of the people who had gotten a first dose by seven weeks ago have gotten a second dose. 🙂
Charts
The province did not updated the dashboard’s vaccine numbers either yesterday or today, I don’t know why. The press release has the cumulative total number of first doses, and I can guess at the number of second doses given in a day by subtracting the cumulative number of second doses given to eligible people for yesterday from today, but there are more second doses that have been given than have been given to eligible people. Therefore, some doses have been given to ineligible people. I am estimating that there are zero ineligible people getting vaccinated these days, but I don’t know.
Anyway, I can make the vax chart, and it will probably be close, but I don’t have any information about supply. Maybe no new doses have arrived, but maybe they have.
Meanwhile, a friend points out that we have enough vax, so the supply charts are not very interesting. Fair enough. So I think I’m going to stop making them.