722 cases of #COVID19 announced in B.C. today — the 19th straight day the province's rolling average has gone down, though this time only by a tiny bit.
Hospitalizations down to 445, and seven new deaths, highest since April 21.
Today's chart.
46,946 people received vaccine shots in B.C. yesterday (2nd highest in the campaign), including 3,605 second doses, the highest mark since February.
We're on pace for every adult getting their first dose in the next five weeks.
We've gone from 60-70 hospitalizations a day in B.C. to 30-50, which is why we're now seeing this decrease.
At the same time, it means we're still going to be over 300 hospitalizations, concentrated heavily in Fraser Health, for a while yet.
The number of cases beyond Hope is pretty consistently under 100 a day now, and dropping, and that's really exciting to see.
There are still way too many cases in Fraser Health, and the vaccination push has to continue there.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I think the thing about reporters increasingly showing their frustration with B.C.'s transparency is that pretty much everybody has changed their lives in huge ways to deal with a deadly pandemic, and the province's communications strategy seems to have stayed the same.
Taking hours to provide information to some requests and weeks for others, providing data only when it can have a shiny bow on it, hearing requests for transparency changes and sticking with the status quo...that's politics.
Most reporters, at a certain level, accept that.
So you'll make a note in your story that the government didn't respond, or that B.C. lags behind province X in metric Y, or that you haven't gotten your FOI back, and move on. There's another story to cover. The daily battle for information continues.
Since today's emergency press conference on #COVID19 data in B.C. is telephone only, I'm going to use this thread to livetweet the questions and answers in a straightforward fashion, instead of the usual charts/context/jokes approach
Dr. Réka Gustafson begins the press conference, says she's going to "raise some awareness" on the public health surveillance done by B.C.
Explains how data is used for making decisions.
"It's an established process, and with every week and day we try to improve it."
Gustafson says the province "makes as much of the data as possible … available publicly."
Says "there has been a particular interest in the data".
Dr. Henry says the data "is for decision making" and there is weekly technical meetings.
What's probably going to happen is the government will provide information on neighbourhood case counts at some point in the near future.
They will applaud themselves for being transparent.
on a related note, the bccdc dashboard (which the government often trumpets as the way they are transparent) is having a "systems" issue for the third time in four days