Press Briefing
I missed the first half of the briefing, and it didn’t look interesting enough to catch up on. I gather that they mostly talked about the vax for kids 5-11. The vax will arrive tomorrow, first invites will go out on Sunday, and kids will start getting vaxxed on Monday. Dix/Henry/Ballem dodged questions about why they weren’t going to start vaxxing on Thursday, saying things which boiled down to, “we want to make sure everything is juuuuust right” (without explaining why they didn’t make sure everything was juuuuust right last week).
This article says that there are 91K kidlets already registered, and something like 350K are eligible. They obviously can’t vaccinate all of the the 90K registered kidlets on Monday, and while they didn’t give a firm answer to how long it would take to get the backlog cleared, Dr. Ballem said that she thought that a “good proportion” of them would get vaxxed by the holidays. They said several times that they think they can get ALL the kids vaxxed in the next two months. (Clearly, they don’t mean 100% of all kids, because some won’t ever get vaxxed. I think they must have meant that they will finish all the willing.)
They mentioned a survey which said that 58% of parents said they wanted to vax their kids immediately, 18% said they wanted to vax their kids, but wanted to wait and see (presumably to see if other people’s kids fell over dead), and 24% said they didn’t think they’d vax their kids.
Something they mentioned is that our vax rate for the 12-17 y/o cohort is one of the highest in the world, and our overall vax rate is higher than almost any other nearby jurisdictions. (Yukon actually has a slightly higher rate than BC, but I think Dix was looking east and south.)
One reporter asked DrH. if she thought her messaging on schools — don’t worry, there’s not much transmission in schools, and kids don’t get very sick — was going to backfire and make parents blasé about getting their kids vaxxed. DrH. said that their SPEAK survey found that a vast majority of parents of ALL backgrounds thought school was very important [so they needed to open schools], that while kids don’t get sick as often, they do still get sick, activities are still curtailed, and anybody who has kids knows that schools are still not “normal”.
Dix gave his numbers, some of which I caught and many of which I did not. Things that came up:
- BC now has 1116 contact tracers, which is more than we had during the third wave. (For reference, on 12 April there were 9937 active cases, about 3x what we have right now.)
- BC has now transferred 135 people from NH to southern health authorities, including 9 since last Thursday, of which 7 were from Peace River North and South.
- He rattled off the number of beds and surge beds we have, and said that Royal Inland is the only hospital over bed capacity. (I presume he meant regular bed capacity, not regular+surge.) He also mentioned something about IH having four outbreaks of over 50 people.
- Some large number of nurses have been hired at Royal Inland recently, I think I heard 83.
Statistics
The vaccine data doesn’t make any sense again today. Yesterday’s press release total vaccination value didn’t match yesterday’s dashboard; today’s dashboard vax numbers are the same as yesterday’s; today’s dashboard vax total is 10K higher than today’s press release. So no charts and no % total population vaxxed today. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I hope the press release % vaxxed numbers are sort of kind of correct.
+324 cases, +1 death. Currently 345 in hospital / 115 in ICU, 3,047 active cases, 210,478 recovered.
| first doses | second doses | |
| of adults | 91.3% | 87.9% |
| of over-12s | 90.9% | 87.4% |
| of all BCers | ?% | ?% |
Charts
