2024-10-26 BC

The hospitalizations per week and ICU admits per week charts look like they are going down, but I don’t believe them: the in-hospital chart looks like it is going up, and the hospitalizations per week and ICU admits per week pretty much always get adjusted upwards later. Meanwhile, the number of cases and the positivity are down slightly, but that looks like noise to me; the wastewater looks steady or maybe going down a little.

Flu still hasn’t taken off.

Press Conference

Dr. Henry gave a press conference to talk about the kickoff of the fall vaccine season (press release, video). I watched it so you don’t have to. I put the most interesting things in bold:

Dr. Henry said we were already seeing record-breaking numbers of vax, that pharmacies have delivered over 369,000 doses of vaccines since the start of vaccination for the general public (care homes got it earlier) last week: ~141K COVID-19 doses and ~228K flu doses. They are issuing invitations in reverse-age order. (I got an invitation for a flu vax on 21 Oct.) She said that she expected that everybody would get an invitation by the first week of November. (<- She didn’t say for which vax. Maybe she thinks most people haven’t had a COVID-19 shot for over six months? That might be true, but I for one am still in my six-month COVID-19 exclusion zone…)

She talked about the mitigation measures that we should all be taking in this respiratory season: covering our coughs, washing our hands, staying away from others when we are sick, wearing a mask “if you have lingering symptoms or if you need extra protection”, and “most importantly”, getting vaccinated. She announced that they were going to be launching an advertising campaign to remind people that they should be doing these things.

I am annoyed that she framed masking first as a way to protect others, and then as “if you need extra protection”, as opposed to something that was reasonable for everybody to do. 🙁

She said that flu and RSV are low, and she expects influenza and RSV levels to accelerate in early November. She notes that COVID-19 was elevated over the summer and is still elevated. Wastewater levels remain high at many sites, hospital admission rates are elevated. We still don’t know enough about the patterns of COVID to be able to predict when it will be high or low.

She said that she’s monitoring levels to figure out if/when we need to have more mitigation measures (i.e. masking in hospitals), but she doesn’t think we’re at a level of pathogens yet this season that warrants masking in health care settings.

She talked a little about H5N1. She said she expects the level of bird flu to go up with the fall bird migration season getting into swing. She said that H5N1 has been detected this week in three poultry farms in BC, and they are working with an alphabet soup of agencies to contain them. They have been monitoring for H5N1 in cattle, and so far they have not seen any H5N1 infected cattle in Canada.

She commented that in BC, we have JN.1 mRNAs vax from Pfizer and Moderna. Novavax has been approved in Canada but Novavax is not marketing it in Canada, which makes it a challenge to get access to it. In other words, she says it is Novavax’ fault that we don’t have any Novavax yet. She recognizes that a lot of people want Novavax, and they are trying to get it. She encourages us to encourage Novavax to sell it to us.

There are two types of flu vax: regular and extra-strength, including two extra-strength ones for the elderly. There’s one extra-strength vax for people in care homes and one for elderly people/immunocompromised in the community. (No, she didn’t say what the difference in the two extra-strength vaxxes was.)

She said that if you had COVID recently, that’s a natural boost, “and that’s good”. (🙄) She said that a vax dose now is not useful: wait at least three months.

RATs are still available; they are still purchasing RATs and they are available in pharmacies around the province. They work best when you have symptoms. If you get a negative test, well, it could be a different virus that you could pass on to other people, and the tests are not perfect. Retest after about two days; if it is still negative, then it is unlikely to be COVID.

She says you don’t need to keep testing until you test negative after a bout of COVID. She says that you are unlikely to be infectious after your symptoms resolve. (I’m not sure I agree, but that’s what she said.)

She got a question about Long COVID, and responded that we still have a (virtual) clinic in BC for Long COVID patients.

Charts

From the BC CDC Situation Report:

From the Viral Pathogen Characterization page:

Percent positivity

In the week ending Oct. 19, you were

  • 13-15 times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 than flu,
  • 15 times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 than RSV,
  • 2.8 times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 than enterovirus or rhinovirus.

Reminder: the graphs below don’t tell how many cases there were, but how many cases they found when testing. Almost nobody gets tested.

Wastewater

From Jeff’s wastewater spreadsheet: