I have been trying to understand why COVID-19 levels have been so low in BC for so long. Levels were r-e-l-a-t-i-v-e-l-y stable for since late October 2023, moving between ~270 cases/week (in April 2024) and ~630 cases/week (in October 2024) for all that time. But starting in October 2024, cases went down steadily, until last week when there were only 59 cases per week.
WHY?
At first I thought it was because so many people got COVID-19 through 2024. And I still think that was the case — at first.
I thought maybe we humans had just finally gotten enough immunity from repeated infections (and a few vaccinations) that we had enough immunity to keep us humans from getting sick over and over again. That seemed unlikely, but I didn’t have a better explanation.
I thought maybe it was just because we hadn’t had a very different COVID-19 variant in a while. Maybe the current strains are just about as bad as it is possible to get, and it couldn’t mutate in any direction without decreasing its fitness. That also seemed unlikely. (We couldn’t be so lucky!)
đź’ˇSomeone finally gave me an explanation that makes sense! I think the initial downturn was because there were so many cases in October, but I think the continued downturn was because we had so much flu! Some viruses cause the innate immune system to rev up (as discussed in this paper (2021-05-18)). Influenza revs up interferon, which protects against COVID-19. (COVID-19 apparently doesn’t rev up interferon as much.)
So the very high level of flu that we have had might have protected us from COVID-19.
That means that as flu comes down, we should expect COVID-19 to go up… and this week, we do see a verrrrry slight uptick in several of the COVID metrics.
CLINICAL TRIAL FOR LONG COVID!
There’s a clinical trial in BC to see how well low-dose naltrexone works for Long COVID patients. If you have Long COVID and have enough spoons to enroll, I personally am asking you to please do. We need studies like this to make progress! (If you don’t have the spoons, please don’t: I don’t want you to crash!)
If you know someone with Long COVID, please tell them about this!
Hospitals
This article (2025-03-31) talks about changes in the provincial health system. The CEO and some of the board of the Provincial Health System Authorities (PHSA) was just replaced; the CEO of Fraser Health was replaced a month ago. The province is also doing a review of health authority spending and decision-making, with PHSA the first one. (PHSA handles BC Emergency Health Services, the BC Cancer Agency, BC Children’s Hospital, and the BC Centre for Disease Control, among other things.)
🏥 This article (2025-03-29) said that the Mission Memorial Hospital’s emergency room would be closed from 6:30pm Saturday March 29 until 8AM Sunday due to a staffing shortage.
I was a little surprised; I think respiratory illnesses are way down, and the weather wasn’t good enough. Last summer, there were staffing issues as doctors went on vacation, but I don’t think the weather was good enough in Mission on the 29th for that to be a factor.
Charts
From the BC CDC Situation Report:
Comparison vs. Other Influenza-Like-Illnesses, from the Viral Pathogen Characterization page:
In the most recent data (ending 29 March) as reported on 3 April 2025, among influenza-like illness (i.e upper respiratory diseases) cases the province has test data for:
- 54.29% were influenza A or B;
- 13.57% were RSV;
- 7.19% were COVID-19;
- 8.78% were entero/rhinoviruses;
- 5.19% were “common cold” coronaviruses;
- 5.89% were metapneumonia viruses;
- adenoviruses and parainfluenza were under 3%.
Wastewater
From Jeff’s wastewater spreadsheet:
