Press Briefing
It was kind of a dull briefing, it didn’t tell me much that I didn’t know. Highlights which were new:
- Transmission is so high right now that businesses really need to focus on business continuity. Figure out now what you are going to do when a third of your staff is out sick. Limit the number of customers; stagger shifts, work from home, etc. depending on your business.
- Last week, they put a stop to social visitors in long term care (but still allowing one “essential visitor” per resident). DrH said emphasized that they know how important social visitors are, and are working to get one social visitor allowed, with rapid antigen tests immediately before entering.
- DrH basically said she wanted out of the Order businesses and businesses needed to figure things out for themselves.
- DrH was challenged on why the province is leaving a million RATs in a warehouse instead of getting them out to LTCH. DrH bristled and said it was an urban legend that there were a million on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere. (Later, a reporter tweeted with a photo of something that showed the province had inventory of ~2M RATs. This probably gets down to the definition of “in a warehouse”. “In a warehouse” implies “collecting dust and being neglected/forgotten about”; it might be that the RATs are in a brightly lit storeroom where people are constantly taking tests out of.) She reminded people that they used lots of RATs in LTCH before the vax mandate, as an alternate way of ensuring LTCH workers were not a danger.
Statistics
Fri/Sat: +4,033 cases
Sat/Sun: +3,069 cases
Sun/Mon: + 2,230 cases
Mon/Tues: +2,542 cases
Over the four days, there was an average of +1 death per day, and approximately +1,819 first doses, +702 second doses, and +13,009 third doses, +9 health care outbreaks.
Currently 298 in hospital / 86 in ICU, 27,106 active cases, 236,309 recovered, 24 health-care facility outbreaks.
| first doses | second doses | third doses | |
| of adults | 92.4% | 89.7% | 22.2% |
| of over-12s | 92.0% | 89.2% | 20.7% |
| of over-5s | 88.3% | 83.0% | * |
| of all BCers | 85.9% | 80.7% | 18.9% |
The positivity rate was 16.8% yesterday, which is down from almost 28.6% on 30 Dec 2021.
Charts
