COVID-19 seems pretty stable at a middling level. Flu has started to make an appearance, but it’s still at quite a low level.
COVID-19
Vaccines
đź’‰ Both Spouse and I got invitations this week to get COVID-19 and influenza vaccines, so it isn’t just for people over 65!
A friend of mine told me he called a pharmacy which said they were doing walk-ins for people over 12 years old.
đź’‰This article (2025-10-23) reports that 36% more people got COVID-19 vaccinations in BC in the first week of the campaign this year than last year.
Transmission
I was really surprised when I compared adult respiratory virus levels over the course of a year. Here are adults; note how much purple (COVID-19) there is and how little green (rhinovirus) and red (RSV):
Now here’s the pediatric counts: note how much green (rhinovirus) there is and how little COVID-19 there is!
Compared to adults, there’s almost no COVID-19 and a lot of rhino/enterovirus and RSV!
I was surprised, as I know from seroprevalence studies that kids do get COVID-19 (and my anecdata supports this). Maybe children’s acute presentation of COVID-19 is more mild than adults’, mild enough that they don’t go to the doctor? (Remember, these show the prevalence of the various viruses in people who go to the doctor, not the prevalence in the general population.)
It’s also possible that adults have a lot of rhinovirus, but it’s mild enough in adults that they never bother going to the doctor for it? I looked briefly for research which shows what percentage of people with a given respiratory virus sought treatment, but was unable to find anything quickly.
Charts
From the Viral Pathogen Characterization page:
In the most recent data (ending 18 Oct) as reported on 23 Oct 2025, among influenza-like illness (i.e upper respiratory diseases) cases the province has test data for:
- 44.5% were COVID-19;
- 29.1% were entero/rhinoviruses;
- 13.9% were influenza A or B;
- 6.0% were RSV;
- 3.9% were parainfluenza;
- 0.9% were adenoviruses;
- 0.9% were metapneumonia viruses;
- 0.6% were “common cold” coronaviruses.
Wastewater
💩💧 From Jeff’s wastewater spreadsheet:
Jeff double-checked the number for Fraser, and that is in fact an accurate representation of the number the province gave. Remember, though, that the province is only reporting one data point per week instead of three — so one would expect that we will see bigger swings in the data.
H5N1
Ostriches
The BC culling-the-ostrich-herd saga is still tied up in the courts; this article (2025-10-17) reports that someone got arrested. If you are interested, this blog post (2025-08-25) by a noted virologist gives some background on what the ostrich farm owners say they were doing with virological research. (The blog post makes it sound extremely dodgy.) The same virologist, in a more recent blog post (2025-10-05) lays out exactly why she feels the ostrich cull should proceed.