2021-12-23 BC

IMPORTANT!

If you tested positive on a rapid test in BC and did not get a PCR test, pub health asks that you please go to https://www.vch.ca/covid-19/you-have-tested-positive, click on the purple “Complete your assessment” button, and fill out the form. (It’s easy, takes five minutes.) I cannot speak for pub health, but I can imagine this would be helpful in many ways, both for you and for pub health (and by extension, all of the rest of us in BC):

  • It makes you eligible for support. “Support” means many things, and I don’t know what is offered and/or will be offered in this jurisdiction right now, but can include someone checking on your symptoms and giving medical advice, getting food, medicine, and/or a pulse oximeter delivered to you, and/or getting a hotel room for you so you can isolate from all your housemates/family. NB: this support is part of “contact tracing”. Some of the province’s contact tracers only do support (my husband has met one such person).
  • It establishes a record of when you got tested. If you go on to develop severe disease, writing your history down NOW will make it easier when the docs try to recreate your history so they can treat you properly. (Imagine having to remember when you developed symptoms, when you took the test, on one of the worst days of your life.)
  • If you go on to develop Long COVID, it might be important to be on record that you’ve tested positive for COVID. This maybe won’t be a factor in Canada, with our publicly-funded health care system, but I have heard that it is (even more) difficult to get treatment for Long COVID in the US if you don’t have a positive COVID-19 test.
  • It lets pub health get more accurate information about case counts, information they use to figure out how to respond.

Mitigation Measures

The province put out a press release saying that if you had to shut down because of this round of Provincial Health Orders, you are eligible for up to $10K in a one-time grant.


This article reports that UBC, SFU, UNBC, and UVic are going to start the Spring term online, with either one or two weeks of remote classes (depending on the institution).

Modelling

This slide deck from the BC COVID-19 Modelling Group says that um we’re in big trouble.

A: Omicron 30% as severe as Delta, B: 50% as severe, C: No reduction in severity.

Statistics

Yesterday: +1,474 cases, +6 deaths, +6,512 first doses, +1,947 second doses, +19,953 other doses. 

Today: Today: +2,046 cases (which is almost certainly an undercount, +1 death, +6,254 first doses, +1,842 second doses, +21,011 other doses.

Currently 195 in hospital / 75 in ICU, 8,739 active cases, 221,872 recovered.

There have been 975 cases Omicron to date. I don’t know how long it takes to decide if a case was Omicron or not. Depending on the lag, you’ll get different figures for the percentage of Omicron:

first dosessecond dosesthird doses
of adults92.2%89.5%18%
of over-12s91.8%89.0%17%
of over-5s87.7%82.7%*
of all BCers85.4%80.5%15.4%

Charts