Vaccines
This article talks about how a number of vaccine clinics will be closing for the holidays.
Press Briefing
The big news was that the Province amended a number of Orders to make them more restrictive. They start early Monday morning and go through the end of January. From their press release, the measures include:
- limiting indoor, personal gatherings, including in rental and vacation properties to the household/residents plus 10 individuals, or one additional household maximum if all are aged 12 and older are fully vaccinated;
- requiring the BC Vaccine Card for organized events of all sizes and ensuring the QR code is scanned at events;
- seating requirements and restricting movement between tables at food and liquor-serving premises, and reinforcing the need to wear masks when not seated;
- limiting venues of 1,000 individuals or more to 50% of the seated capacity with reinforced masking requirements and scanning of the BC Vaccine Card QR code;
- pausing all sports tournaments while the order is in effect; and
- all New Year’s Eve organized gatherings and events will be restricted to being seated-only events, with no mingling or dancing allowed.
Q&A
The questions mostly were about boosters and rapid tests, with answers that didn’t add much to our knowledge. What I learned:
- The province is working on RATs and will say more on Tuesday.
- They had planned on giving boosters to younger people at eight months because the science said that gave better and more durable protection, while older people needed six months.
- They are resisting giving boosters at less than six months intervals because while it might be better for Omicron, they also wanted people to have good protection for the next variant.
- The clinically extremely vulnerable went slightly ahead of the place in line they would have had if the invites went out strictly by date of second dose. They defended that because it not only would make their lives better, but it would reduce strain on the health care system.
- BC has the largest contact tracing team of all the provinces, but they acknowledged that the contact tracers were going to get overwhelmed, and so they were going to have to prioritize. One of the things they said they were going to have to do was, for people who had milder/less dangerous cases (like young vaccinated people without comorbidities) was have them manage their own cases and notify their contacts themselves.
- They mentioned that the pool that does contact tracing also does support for the isolating, testing, and immunization, so they have to manage moving people around in that pool.
Dix made a plea in his comments for people in Northern Health to get vaccinated, saying that there were 1800 pharmacy slots and only 450 were booked. A reporter asked why, if there were 1350 slots empty, why they didn’t open those slots up for boosters. Dix deflected the question by throwing up a lot of chaff about what a great job the vaccine campaign was doing in general. I suspect that the answer really was “because our IT system isn’t capable of having different invite rules on a per-Health Authority basis”, but that’s perhaps too embarrassing to admit.
Statistics
+789 cases, +3 deaths, +4,244 first doses, +2,583 second doses, +27,388 other doses.
Currently 191 in hospital / 74 in ICU, 4,313 active cases, 218,960 recovered.
There have been 302 cases of Omicron to date.
| first doses | second doses | third doses | |
| of adults | 92.0% | 89.2% | 16% |
| of over-12s | 91.6% | 88.7% | 15% |
| of over-5s | 86.9% | 82.5% | * |
| of all BCers | 84.6% | 80.3% | 13.5% |
Charts
