week ending 2022-05-12 BC – Pandemics in British Columbia

Press Briefing

There was a press briefing on Tuesday, which didn’t actually say much.

The major announcement (which was echoed in this press release) was that they have finished getting data from 17 of the 18 Colleges of regulated health care professionals about their vax statuses. Aggregated by College:

physicians and surgeons: 98.0%
dieticians: 98%
occupational therapists: 96.9%
pharmacy technicians: 96.8%
pharmacists: 96.7%
psychologists: 96.1%
optometrists: 96.0%
dentists: 95.9%
physical therapists: 95.2%
opticians: 94.9%
speech language pathologists: 92.9%
denturists: 92.9%
dental assistants: 92.8%
dental hygienists: 92.6%
audiologists/hearing instrument practitioners: 91.9%
dental technicians: 90.7%
massage therapists: 87.9%
traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and acupuncturists: 79.0%
chiropractors: 78.1%
naturopathic physicians: 69.2%

What they danced around, however, was that it’s not clear if you’ll be able to find out if your provider is vaccinated. They are worried about balancing provider privacy while at the same time ensuring patient safety. Dr. Henry said multiple times that patient safety trumped privacy, but clearly they also wanted to maintain privacy. It might be that you can call and say, “I prefer to see a provider who has been vaccinated” and then the clinic has to adjust if the provider has not been vaccinated. (For solo practices, that’s going to be kind of difficult!)

Q&A

I’m not going to include all the questions because some were stupid. Snark is mine.

Q: Do you have a breakdown of vaccination of regulated health care providers by health authority? A: No.

Q: Quebec is giving 4th shots to everyone, why don’t weeeeee get them? A: We have a CEV list, which most provinces do not. (The unstated implication was that Quebec has to use the really blunt instrument of fourth doses for everybody in order to catch their CEVs.) We have also been watching our severe outcomes by age, and three doses gives really good protection so far. We’ll change this if we see waning.

Q: Why have so many doses (600K) been thrown out? A: At the beginning, when we had supply issues, we worked really hard to make sure we didn’t waste any, but now that supply is not an issue, we’re willing to waste some of the doses in a vial if it means getting a few in arms. It’s a demand problem. The percent that have been wasted because they expired is actually quite low — we got some with a relatively short expiry date.

Q: Are pregnant people going to get a 4th dose? A: We aren’t seeing a lot of breakthroughs with three doses.

Q: Dr.H, have you had COVID-19? A: I have managed to avoid it.

Q: Do we have BA.2.12 in the province. A: It varies by Health Authority but yes. It’s on the web site. (For your information, here it is:

)

Q: Are we in a good place? A: Dix: last week, we had 17K or 18K HC workers out sick for at least one day, that’s stressing the system.

Q: Have we had any cases of pediatric hepatitis in BC? A: No. We were investigating one kid, but it turned out not to be hepatitis.

Mitigation Measures

This press release says that 337K surgeries were completed in the year ending 31 March 2022, which is a record.

This article says that the province dropped $55K in fines against a collection of three scofflaw Chilliwack pastors.

This article says that all of Canada’s COVID-19 benefit programs ended on May 7 (as planned). NB: I am really surprised at how few news articles there were on that.

This article says that a judge declined to stop a suit by a group healthcare workers challenging the vax mandate, saying that the group did have standing to sue.