week ending 2022-04-28 BC

Okay, folks, I am now willing to say that we are in the middle of a big wave that nobody is talking about. There are currently 570 people in hospital with COVID-19, and the pre-Omicron max hospitalizations was 515 (on 28 April 2021). This is bad.

Yes, yes, some of them are there “with” COVID-19 and not “for” COVID-19, but hospitalization are still increasing which means cases must be increasing. Furthermore, hospitalizations are a lagging indicator, and hospitalizations are rising faster than cases — which is more evidence that the case counts are badly, badly, badly undercounted.

The BC COVID-19 Modelling Group’s latest report estimates that our true case count is ~5K cases / day:

The BC COVID-19 modelling group also reported on a survey done through Facebook which asks if you know people who are sick:

Meanwhile today’s BC CDC Situation Report shows that COVID-19 in wastewater is still rising:

Andthe BC CDC Dashboard shows that the positivity rate is climbing:

All in all, I believe this says that we are not about to get hit by a wave, we are already in a wave.

Vaccines

I don’t understand the Novavax/J&J info on the BC CDC dashboard. They are being lazy and combining Novavax and J&J. I thought that we had basically zero distribution of J&J in the province — I didn’t think that the federal government ever released their stock. My memory is that there were a very small number of shots that were J&J (probably from people who got the shot in the US and then came home), but I didn’t track that.

Well, now the dashboard says that there have been 12,313 J&J and Novavax doses administered, but the dashboard also says that there have only been 457 doses since last week, and I’m pretty sure there were almost no doses last week. Arg. Gotta love the BC data pipeline, not.

Bottom line: I can’t tell you if there has been a great response to Novavax or not.

Statistics

From the BC CDC Weekly Data Report and the BC CDC dashboard:  +2,276 cases (+325.1 per day); 355 hospital admissions, +42 all-cause deaths (6.0 per day).

Currently 570 in hospital / 47 in ICU.

In the past week, roughly +306 first doses, +636 second doses, +3,909 other doses (which I suspect are mostly second boosters).

Charts

From the BC CDC Weekly BC Data Report:


From the BC CDC Situation Report: