Saskatchewan continues to be doing a great job vaccinating, leading the country having given out over 95% of the vaccines its been delivered. It’s given out more doses per capita than every other province.
At the same time, Regina is a hot mess of COVID. And that will spread.
There’s no way to vaccinate fast enough to fix the COVID spread. It’s impossible.
The vaccines are coming in huge numbers from April on, but there needs to be other measures to keep this in check. Even just for a little while. To buy some time.
Look, every Oiler fan has seen what happens when you don’t play a full 60 minutes.
And Sask fans know damn well you can lose if you put too many people out there on the last play of the game.
We’re close. We can’t screw it up now.
Regina needs a circuit breaker.
Evidence for my thread. Variants were likely introduced in Regina around January. So even as cases were falling, variants were spreading. And now they’re exploding.
It’s worth noting, this was a choice. Sask never did shut down as much as other provinces. In doing so, we played with fire. We knew introducing a fast-spreading variant while spread was high was a recipe for disaster. We hoped we’d get lucky and avoid variants. Regina did not.
I tried to look at how well provinces are vaccinating. Using how much vaccine the provinces have on hand & their rate of vaccination over the last 7 days, we can estimate how many "days" of vaccine they have left in stock.
Data from @covid_canada.
This is Canada as a whole. You can see the days where vaccines are distributed in large amounts and the provinces work through them. Provinces were getting down to about a week of vaccine supply left before the next shipment, though they got down to the 5 day mark yesterday.
Ontario has over 1/3 of Canada's population, so they run pretty close to Canada as a whole. For the last couple weeks, though, they've been keeping less vaccine on hand than Canadian average. As of yesterday, they had about 4.4 days of vaccine left. (Big shipment coming in today)
Looking at something with vaccine data. If we’re trying to see how quickly provinces are administering vaccines, using % of vaccines administered doesn’t paint a clear picture.
Think it would be better to say “at the current pace, how quickly will provinces run out of vaccine?”
Like, if you look at the average number of vaccines administered over the last 7 days, and then look at how many vaccines have been distributed to provinces, you can see how many days until the provinces run out of vaccines if they keep going at the current pace.
Based on data as of last night from @covid_canada, there have been 4,097,934 vaccines given out of 4,773,340 distributed. Provinces are giving an average of 135,233 vaccines a day.
Which means at this pace, they’ll run out in 5 days.
Good news! AZ finished up another trial in the US, showing 79% efficacy! So even better than previous trials. Still 100% effective against serious illness.
32000 people in the study, no increased risk of blood clots seen.
As is the case with all these vaccine data releases, this one is via press release, with actual scientific paper to follow. Given the urgency of the situation, that’s to be expected.
Also positive, there’s lots of variants floating around in the US & AZ still showed strong.
One more positive: the new AstraZeneca trial showed equal effectiveness in people over 65.
It’s hard to compare directly to vaccines but on the surface, it looks like vaccines provide better immunity than natural infection, especially the mRNA vaccines. Maybe Novavax too.
It may appear natural immunity beats out AstraZeneca and J&J, but the effectiveness of vaccines is inclusive of ALL ages, not just under 65. So those vaccines are likely at least on par. (To say nothing of protection against severe infection, death and variants).