"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'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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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.