Sports
This article reports that three Canucks are “in the COVID-19 protocol”, meaning they are sick or have been exposed. But wait! This article says that a fourth went into protocol IN THE MIDDLE OF A GAME!
Vaccines
The Province reminds us that the first COVID-19 vaccine in the province was given one year ago.
Round number alert! The province has now given more than nine million doses!
Press Briefing
Not gonna lie, I wanted Dr. Henry and Minister Dix to act like their hair was on fire for this presser, but they were very low-key. Essentially all of Dr. Henry’s time was spent going over the slides that I believe will turn into the Data Summary tomorrow. You can go look at those slides, there’s not really anything new in them. The various metrics had been going down nicely (especially in Northern Health) and now are stalled a little bit.
There were two slides on Omicron. The first said that they were doing WGS of essentially all the PCR tests now, and that there were now 44 cases in the province. She mentioned four came from a 124-person outbreak at UVic, all under 25, which came from multiple introductions, mostly at off-campus parties, and may have been seeded by a big rugby tournament at Queen’s. Twenty of the forty-four Omicron cases came from recent travellers, including ones from the US and Iran.
The second Omicron slide showed some projections for what might happen, and I had the impression that she kind of hurried it off the stage. I don’t know why she didn’t talk it up, why she didn’t say LOOK PEOPLE SHIT IS ABOUT TO HIT THE FAN!!! She did say some milquetoast things about how people should think about whether they really should go have large holiday parties, but she says that kind of thing every time, this didn’t seem any more urgent.
Dix talked about the various statistics, which had no big surprises. He did also say that:
- They’ve give I think 35% more boosters than their forecast seven weeks ago, so they are ahead on that yay.
- There is only one long term care home and one assisted living home outbreak currently active now (YAY!), which he attributed to the vax mandate for staff and boosters for residents (and I think staff).
- 52% of the kidlets 5-11 y/o have registered, and 73K have been vaxxed.
- They have sent stiff letters to 1,715 people who tried and failed to upload their own (presumably fraudulent) vax info to the vax system. I don’t know how that’s even possible, but there were vague references to law enforcement.
- 153 people cumulatively have been flown south from Northern Health, 118 who had COVID-19.
- They are expecting to get a bunch of rapid tests from the feds in mid to late Jan, which they will distribute (free). (See more on this in Q&A.)
- He used the metaphor of this being a “fight”, which I am not sure I had heard him use before. They have normally been very careful to couch everything in cooperative, nurturing terms instead of aggressive, competitive terms.
- Dix and Henry both talked about how more and more pharmacies were getting rolled into the booster program. There are now more than 350 pharmacies which are integrated with the vaccine record system.
Q&A
Condensed, aggregated, and snarkified.
Q: BC has a shitton of rapid tests, why have you been sitting on them instead of passing them out like Halloween candy like Alberta? A: We don’t have the same kind of tests as Alberta. 1.3M of our tests need a health care professional to administer the test, sometimes because you need a machine to read the sample. We use those at a lot at congregate living situations like work camps, correctional facilities, and farms, also at schools and some businesses — places where the machine can stay in one place. We had hoped that we would have more of the lateral-flow tests (which can be self-administered), but we haven’t gotten them. We are actually using 35K rapid tests per week (vs. 90-100 PCR tests/week).
We do have have about 700K rapid tests in boxes of 25 to 35 (unlike Alberta, which has boxes of five apiece), which we can break into smaller boxes, but it takes a lot of staff effort to do that, and the pub health staff has been kind of busy.
The other questions were stupid, so I’m not going to bother. They were either asked already or didn’t really make sense.
Statistics
+519 cases, +0 deaths, +5,322 first doses, +2,273 second doses, +20,599 other doses.
Currently 191 in hospital / 81 in ICU, 3,171 active cases, 218,001 recovered.
| first doses | second doses | third doses | |
| of adults | 91.9% | 89.1% | 14% |
| of over-12s | 91.5% | 88.6% | 13% |
| of over-5s | 86.6% | 82.4% | * |
| of all BCers | 84.3% | 80.2% | 12.0% |
Charts
