2021-07-09 BC

Excess Deaths As you might recall, there was a report that I talked about at length in the 2021-07-05 BC blog post which said that the BC COVID-19 death rate was higher than reported. Now, every jurisdiction’s COVID-19 death rate is going to be higher than reported. (There will be some COVID-19 deaths which got… Continue reading 2021-07-09 BC

2021-07-09 General

VOCs This report from Public Health England says that Delta now makes up 97% of the genotyped cases. This report from Public Health England says that there have been a few cases of Lambda from international travel, but it does not seem to be out-competing Delta and does not seem to be particularly vax-evasive. It… Continue reading 2021-07-09 General

2021-07-08 BC

Statistics Today: +59 cases, +1 death, +93,103 doses, +10,159 first doses, +82,944 second doses (of which 528 were AZ). NB: These numbers are so high compared to what we’ve been doing, that I suspect that a bunch of vaccinations from the weekend got written on a piece of paper that fell behind the filing cabinet… Continue reading 2021-07-08 BC

2021-07-08 General

Vaccines Pfizer says that a third shot boosts antibody levels 5x to 10x against COVID Classic and Beta. Remember that antibodies aren’t the whole story, and that Pfizer has incentive to get as many people as possible to buy their vax. They also said they are working on a Delta-specific booster. The US FDA immediately… Continue reading 2021-07-08 General

2021-07-07 General

Vaccines A few days ago, there was a Israeli Ministry of Health report saying that Pfizer was only 64% effective against the Delta strain, which was far lower than other studies had found. It looks like the study in Israel was against all infection, including asymptomatic infection, while the others were against symptomatic infection. That… Continue reading 2021-07-07 General

2021-07-07 BC

Transmission From yesterday’s BCCDC Weekly Data Summary, most cases in June were in unvaccinated younger adults. Statistics Today: +56 cases, +0 deaths, +6,671 first doses, +57,120 second doses (513 of which were AZ). I started to freak out about there being a rise two days in a row, but then a friend reminded me that… Continue reading 2021-07-07 BC

2021-07-06 BC

Seroprevalence This tweet has this graph which references StatCan and says that the seroprevalence of COVID-19 in BC after the second wave was about 1.6 (with a possible range of 0.5% to 2.9%, eyeballing): This is very different from the 5 to 6% which this survey (that I reported on yesterday) found. I don’t know… Continue reading 2021-07-06 BC

2021-07-06 General

Vaccines In yesterday’s General blog post, I pointed to a study from Israel that said that Pfizer was only 64% effective. This thread does a takedown of that study. This preprint also says that AZ+Pfizer is a lot better (in test tubes, anyway) than AZ+AZ, and even a bit better than Pfizer+Pfizer. Disease This article… Continue reading 2021-07-06 General

2021-07-03/04/05 General

Seroprevalence This study from 18 June 2021 found that at the end of the second wave, between 5 and 6% of Canadians had antibodies to COVID-19, up from 2% after the first wave. Vaccines This study (done in Ontario) says that Moderna scores best against all the variants, and that Moderna does well against Delta… Continue reading 2021-07-03/04/05 General