Mitigation Measures Huh. This web page from the US CDC says that an N95 with an exhalation valve is as good or better at source control (i.e. protecting the people the wearer is close to) than a procedure mask (the standard medical hook-over-your-ears mask that you see unfortunately frequently see lying on the ground as… Continue reading 2021-08-14 General
2021-08-13 BC
Mitigation Measures It is unclear if BC Ferries passengers’ will need to be vaccinated as part of the federal mandate that various types of passengers need to be vaccinated. Vaccines It’s Friday, so there’s an update on vaccinations by age, with data through 7 August: Treatment This article warns of staffing shortages, especially among nurses.… Continue reading 2021-08-13 BC
2021-08-13 General
Hospitalizations An independent statistician pulled together this graph: Why does Quebec have such a fall-off in hospitalizations/confirmed case and ICU admissions/confirmed case when the other provinces do not? Because Quebec does a better job testing/finding cases, so the denominator is bigger. Note that the most recent data is excluded because the episode date is when… Continue reading 2021-08-13 General
2021-08-12 BC
Long-Term Care Homes Today there was a press briefing where Dr. Henry/Minister Dix announced new orders for Long-Term Care Homes. They said that they were hoping that they could cope with unvaccinated workers by testing them frequently and having more stringent PPE requirements for them. Delta had other ideas, apparently, so they are now mandating… Continue reading 2021-08-12 BC
2021-08-11/12 General
Testing Three dogs have been trained in Vancouver to sniff out COVID-19 with very high accuracy! Transmission Yow! This preprint says that 6.8% of COVID-19 patients in England caught it in the hospital. Vaccines Good news! Adolescents tolerated two doses of Moderna, and the vax arm had no cases vs. four in the placebo arm.… Continue reading 2021-08-11/12 General
2021-08-11 BC
Statistics Today: +536 cases, +1 death, +4,010 first doses, +22,504 second doses. Currently 72 in hospital / 29 in ICU, 3,585 active cases, 148,446 people recovered. first doses second doses of adults 83.0% 72.9% of over-12s 82.2% 71.1% of all BCers 74.8% 64.7% We have 551,630 doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 21.2… Continue reading 2021-08-11 BC
2021-08-10 BC
Transmission This article says that Kelowna General Hospital is rescheduling some elective surgeries because they have so many COVID-19 patients. Statistics +395 cases, +0 deaths, +3,810 first doses, +16,188 second doses. Currently 71 in hospital / 23 in ICU, 3,284 active cases, 148,215 recovered. first doses second doses of adults 83.0% 72.5% of over-12s 82.1%… Continue reading 2021-08-10 BC
2021-08-10 General
Vaccines Sigh. Yesterday I showed a graph from Israel which looked a little funny, and repeated the explanations that were given. (BTW, I had heard before that Israel’s cases looked funny because the outbreak started in areas that were highly vaxxed and social separate from the unvaxxed places.) Today, one of the authors of the… Continue reading 2021-08-10 General
2021-08-09 BC
Press Briefing I didn’t actually watch the press briefing, but this tweet says that there wasn’t much news aside from that the province is now allowing a second dose at 4 weeks across the province. (They had shortened the interval in the Okanagan.) Mitigation Measures The Americans are coming! This article says that there was… Continue reading 2021-08-09 BC
2021-08-09 General
Transmission This study took COVID patients and counted the virus particles they emitted (well, RNA pieces). They found four interesting things: Being quiet keeps most of your viruses to yourself. A few people were more dangerous when talking than singing. Most of the viral load came from fine aerosol particles. There was a huge variation… Continue reading 2021-08-09 General