2021-05-06 BC – Pandemics in British Columbia

My computer is in the shop today, so I’m writing this up on my inferior computers. Thus it’s going to be shorter today (and probably for the next six days).

Data

The Vancouver Sun published some leaked data from the provincial public health, showing much more detail in geographic area and demographics than what they had been releasing. Ooops.

Press Briefing

Highlights from today:

Case counts and hospitalizations are going down, whew, but they aren’t down far enough.
Yay Pfizer has been approved for over-12s, but we haven’t decided yet exactly how we are going to vax them. We’ll let you know.
We are still paying a LOT of attention to Surrey. We’re putting kiosks in gurdwaras and malls and grocery stores. We haven’t quite started going door-to-door yet, but that’s not too far outside our thinking.
Surrey has gotten more vax per person than anywhere else, but it also has the biggest challenges: lots of essential workers, biggest population, high density, and multi-generational households.
It would be nice to do an all-of-community vax of Surrey like we did with Whistler and Prince Rupert, but it’s just too goddam big.
We have gotten 178K registrations in the past three days, so we are doing something right, but we must do more.
A 40 y/o woman from the Interior got a blood clot after getting an AZ dose. She noticed the symptoms, contacted her provider, who recognized what needed to be done, got her a blood test, and so caught it early. She’s getting treatment in a hospital. We knew there was a risk, but we know how to recognize it, how to test for it, and how to treat it. Clinicians have been made aware. The system is working.
If you got AZ, then in the 4-28 days afterwards, if you have a severe persistent headache, or swelling or redness in a limb, or abdominal or chest pain, get help right away.
We have seen the initial data from the UK mix&match study, and we are not going to tell you what it said, but we will tell you that we will give everybody who got a first dose of AZ the option of either getting another AZ or getting an mRNA.
REGISTER REGISTER REGISTER!!! It not only helps you get a shot ASAP, but it helps us manage the clinics — to figure out how much we need to send where.
REGISTER REGISTER REGISTER!!! We are going to start moving down the age cohorts VERY fast now. NB: he’s REALLY not kidding. We have a half a million doses (ish) on hand right now, and more is coming. We’re going to do AT LEAST a full decade of birth years per week.
We gave 52K vaccinations yesterday, and we can do more. We have the capacity to do more than 20K vaccinations per day in FH. That works out to about 57K/day in all of BC, which is close to what we did yesterday.