2021-06-23 BC

Vaccines

I have wondered how much vax is getting wasted. DrH has assured us a few times (several months ago) that it’s “very little”, but the reporters have not asked for numbers and it’s not in the data.

Well, yesterday, Dix said something like “We only have around forty thousand doses of Pfizer right now”. The number received minus the number injected for Pfizer is 43,775 according to the BC CDC dashboard. Even if the actual number was 38K and Dix was rounding up to 40K, that’s still only 6K doses wasted out of 3,384,420 — so at maximum 0.2%. I think that’s pretty good.

Variants

From the Weekly Data Summary, the Delta strain is at about 6% of the cases. This is down from 9% last week! Yay Public Health!!

In the Weekly Data Summary, they talked a bit about how BC is different from England and why that mattered for the Delta strain. We have a much higher (1 dose) vax rate than England did then they had the same rate of Delta. In particular, their young people (who are the ones mostly getting sick) are much less vaxxed. Their 18 year-olds only started getting first doses last week, while our eligible age went down to 18 on April 23 — almost nine weeks ago.

Reminder: our vaccines are really crappy (33%) against infection of the Delta strain with only one dose, but they are still quite good against hospitalization (~80%).

Mitigation measures

A while back, I had written that you can’t vax your way out of a pandemic, so I was worried when they started relaxing restrictions. If we stop doing mitigation measures, I thought, the pandemic will blow up again, especially with Delta!

What I didn’t fully appreciate is that we are still doing important mitigation measures. Mitigation isn’t only wearing masks indoors and not having dinner at your friends: it’s also getting tested and isolating when sick. It’s also public health doing test/trace/track.

When there are lots of cases, what each person does is probably more important. When pub health is too overwhelmed to do test/trace/track well, then staying home and wearing masks does become critical, but when there are only a few cases and pub health can test/trace/track really hard, then the pub health mitigation measures are enough.

Statistics

Today: +87 cases, +1 death, +7,512 first doses, +50,718 second doses. Currently 109 in hospital / 41 in ICU, 1,119 active cases,144,383 recovered.

There are no new cases in the Northern Health region.

	first doses	second doses
of adults	77.2%	23.1%
of over-12s	75.8%	22.7%
of all BCers	69.0%	20.6%

NB: One of the figures for “of adults” is wrong, but I don’t know if it’s the first doses or second doses. I suspect that the first doses of adults figure is wrong and should be 81.3%.

We have 549,907 doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 9.5 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more doses than we’d received by 8 days ago.

We have 476,081 mRNA doses in fridges; we’ll use it up on 8.2 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more mRNA doses than we’d received by 5 days ago.

We have 73,826 AZ doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 16.9 days at last week’s rate.