"Look at my phone," says John Horgan, as he defends the province's FOI proposals.

he turns his smartphone to media

"I play Scrabble, I have Spotify ... I know what the weather is going to be like in Prince Rupert."

what...what is happening
Horgan also says that the FOI fee has not been settled, and in fact there may be no fee, and then argues what he says are good parts of the proposal that have nothing to do with the fee.

this is just such an awkward retreat
For context: the B.C. government says the opposition makes FOI requests for screenshots of Ministers' home screens, and it's an abuse of the system.

The question was about the proposed $25 fee for all requests.

it was...a moment

It's official: "I play Scrabble, I have Spotify" has replaced "Everyone should reflect on what life would be like if they were Irish", as my favourite "Horgan just sort of riffs on a concept in a weird but ultimately harmless way during a press conference" moment of 2021

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More from @j_mcelroy

22 Oct
who is ready for some charts
B.C. had a pretty crummy week!

At a time when every other province has much lower per capita case counts, or a trendline that's been going significantly down, B.C.'s rolling average went up 13%, with active case counts and hospitalizations essentially static.

Not great! Image
Most of this is due to another big surge in Northern B.C., which is seeing transmission similar to Alberta and Saskatchewan at the moment.

But none of the other four health authorities saw a real decline this week, and a couple saw a gentle rise. Image
Read 7 tweets
28 Sep
"The Ministry of Health confirms this is accurate," was the only sentence by the B.C. government in an email to CBC News about the 99% chart.

It wasn't.

cbc.ca/news/canada/br…
Bless people who think journalism in B.C. works this way, but government data analysts aren’t allowed to speak to media.

Instead, we get a communications director who tells us information the government would like us to hear — sometimes helpful, sometimes not.
The story quotes a UBC mathematician who’s helped with official modelling and says these numbers are hard to measure, and I’ve mentioned a few times the limits of B.C.’s IT.

But I think it’s more germane that the government said something was accurate when it clearly wasn’t.
Read 4 tweets
24 Sep
who is ready for some charts
Overall a moderately encouraging week in B.C. for reducing transmission, with the rolling average down 5% and active cases essentially stable, despite ongoing weird data corrections in different regions
The B.C. government provided the figures for one day of the number people still in hospital originally for #COVID19, but who no longer count to the daily total.

So we can't really chart that, but here's what it looks like in comparison for one day.
Read 7 tweets
24 Sep
Here's a tiny story about everybody's favourite show: British Columbia, pandemic data, and government transparency.

Today's episode: the case of the 99% vaccination rate!
It took some time, but the government now breaks down % of people vaccinated in a pretty detailed way: not just by local health area, but by age and by health region.

And that publicly available data says that 99% of people 18-29 in Coastal Health have gotten a vaccine dose.
99% of people 18-29 in Vancouver Coastal Health vaccinated would be an amazing story, and an unbelievable success for public health officials in convincing a demographic that across the world has been a bit slower to get a shot.

But that's just it: it's unbelievable.
Read 10 tweets
24 Sep
The B.C. government has put out a long statement on how they count hospitalizations for #COVID19.

It says there are 152 additional people in hospital, above the 330 in the official count.

When patients are no longer infectious, they're removed from the count.
The government statement says "these discontinued isolation cases are reported independently from B.C.'s COVID numbers. They are included in reports on overall hospital capacity and critical-care capacity."

Which is not particularly true, since we don't get a raw number.
It's important to remember that the way the government reports hospitalizations has not changed, and we talked about this a lot several months ago.

But we're at the height of the 4th wave, health care workers are more burned out that ever, so that uncounted number matters more.
Read 6 tweets
21 Sep
who is ready for some bc election tweets
Is this the election where the counting of votes in B.C. has some suspense in determining who forms government?

Maybe! Particularly if the strong results for the Conservatives in Atlantic Canada continue in Ontario and Quebec.
B.C. starts counting its votes 30 minutes after everyone else, at 7pm local time.

If the Liberals are up by less than 20 seats around 7:15, then we'll have big drama in who forms a plurality, and a lot of time spent on B.C.
Read 31 tweets

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