2025-11-21 BC

Hospitals

This article (2025-11-19) reports that the ICU at West Coast General Hospital in Alberni was going to close temporarily on 2025-11-20 until they can hire/transfer enough specialized staff. (Patients who need the ICU would be stabilized and then transferred to other hospitals.) The BC health minister said that this showed that there is a workforce shortage all over the province and that they are working on fixing that.

This Mastodon posting (2025-11-20) lays blame on many health care workers being sidelined by Long COVID and/or having “quit from being overworked in unsafe work environments”.

COVID-19

Charts

From the Viral Pathogen Characterization page:

There were a lot fewer samples this week than the previous week (for all of the viruses), I presume at least in part because of Remembrance Day. That means that it looks like some of the levels are going down, when the % positive is actually going up (e.g. flu, enterovirus, RSV) or staying flat (e.g. COVID-19). I suspect we’ll see a rebound/overshoot in next week’s data.

I don’t like the province’s charts, so I make my own with their data:

In the most recent data (ending 15 Nov) as reported on 20 Nov 2025, among influenza-like illness (i.e upper respiratory diseases) cases the province has test data for:

  • 33.6% were COVID-19;
  • 23.6% were influenza A or B;
  • 23.0% were entero/rhinoviruses;
  • 11.8% were RSV;
  • 5.5% were parainfluenza;0.3% were metapneumonia viruses;
  • 2.0% were adenoviruses;
  • 0.3% were metapneumonia viruses;
  • 0.3% were “common cold” coronaviruses.

Wastewater

💧💩 From Jeff’s wastewater spreadsheet:

RSV

Immunization

I have a pretty long snippet in this week’s General posting about how wonderfully effective the new maternal RSV vaccinations and monoclonal antibodies for babies are at reducing hospitalization for babies.

Meanwhile, this article (2025-11-18) says that BC does not pay for nirsevimab (trade name Beyfortus) which costs between CAD$800 and CAD$900 on a private-pay basis! Only two other provinces don’t pay for nirsevimab. (It is rather expensive: CAD$800 to CAD$900 per shot.)