Wastewater
In yesterday’s BC post, I mentioned that the wastewater data didn’t match last week’s. At yesterday’s press conference (see below, which I missed because I didn’t know it was happening, then it took a while to find good video footage of it), the province said they have re-tested all of their historical samples of wastewater data with the new, more sensitive test; now they have a contiguous set of (hopefully better) data. So I wasn’t imaginging things: all the wastewater data is different now.
I didn’t take a screengrab, but I am pretty sure that yesterday, there was no explanation of that change on the wastewater page yesterday, grumble grumble. Sigh. (There is an explanation today.)
Because today is a stat holiday, the wastewater data page did not get updated, so my buddy Jeff doesn’t have an update to his spreadsheet. He says the next wastewater data update will be on 11 April.
Press Conference
There was a lot in the press conference which wasn’t new to me or about COVID-19 (for example, Minister Dix talking about increasing healthcare staffing) so my commanets about the press conference will be (relatively) brief.
Influenza
Because this is my blog and I care about influenza: Dix did mention that 1.78M flu doses were administered in BC, which I calculate as being ~35% of the population. Dr. Henry pointed out that we had a really early and really brief flu period, which she attributed in part to the high flu vax uptake:
Spring Boosters
Dix said that the spring booster campaign has started. Immunizations in care homes will start on 11 April and be done by the end of May. He said invites have been going out in order to priority groups:
- Over 80 and/or clinically extremely vulnerable people over 18 in groups 1 and 2 (no, I don’t know what that means);
- clinically vulnerable adults in category 3 (I still don’t know);
- indigenous people aged 50 to 69;
- people aged 60 to 79 who have no history of COVID-19.
(This is consistent with what is shown on the province’s vaccine information page.)
Data
Dr. H announced that they are going to stop doing weekly respiratory reports effective immediately and will go to biweekly. I have to decide if this blog is going to go to biweekly or not, but I probably will cut back to biweekly.
On 20 April, they are going to stop updating the COVID-19 dashboard and the epidemiology app. 🙁
On 4 May, they are going to simplify and consolidate COVID-19 data (whatever that means) and go to monthly updates. :sob: They do promise that at that point they are going to give us data on reinfections thirty days after previous infection. (Right now, they only tell us about first infections.) There was an implication that in order to give us information about reinfections after thirty days, the case data would start to be even laggier than it is now. 🙁
They also are going to stop updating the other respiratory data (which I presume means this page) on 4 May until next respiratory illness season (which seems reasonable).