Of all the recent missteps by the @bcndp and Dr Henry, the shutdown of testing is the biggest political miscalculation. People may have tolerated the passive hiding of data, but when the govt ACTIVELY keeps them from knowing their own health status... Feelings sour fast. #bcpoli 2/ Knowing that the @bcndp is STILL sitting on a stockpile of rapid tests that they refuse to distribute to ordinary folks is the icing on the paternalistic cake. If you're going to deny us provincial PCR testing, at least let us do our own with the tests WE PAID FOR.

Q for BC CovidTwitter: when the prov lumps in private test results with public ones for reporting purposes, are the private ones rapid tests? or PCR? If the former, why are they good enough to help dilute our positivity rates, but not to help regular folks stay safe? #bcpoli Q: if Dr Henry insists on the min 6mth interval before booster to optimize immune response, okay... but why not go all hands on deck to urgently boost all at that mark NOW? Why wait? 50+ are due. PS. you can't get an optimal immune response from a dead person. #bcpoli

Team BC unity, a short thread:
1. One of the biggest failings of the @bcndp Covid response is the total lack of effort spent engendering a feeling that we're all working together towards a common goal. This is a tragedy - but it's also harming us and dividing us. 2. We never had targets we were aiming for together. Rule changes felt capricious and often last minute, not the result of shared metrics over which we had some collective control. Data was withheld or obscured 'for our own good', a snide kind of paternalism that bred anxiety.

1/ This is Ignaz Semmelweis. In the mid 19th century, he discovered that rates of a fatal bacterial infection among expectant mothers plummeted if doctors changed one simple aspect of their daily routines. It was... surprising. Established medical science couldn't explain it. 2/ Semmelweis worked at one of two large Viennese maternity clinics. The mortality rate at his clinic was 10%, sometimes close to 20%. At the second clinic, it was 4%. Women would go to great lengths to avoid admission to his clinic - some resorting to giving birth in the street.

Questions for the Govt from Me, an Armchair Nobody, about School Transmissions in BC

1/ Could you give us access to the school transmission studies you completed so we can evaluate the underlying assumptions and methods, and understand how you reached your conclusions? 2/ To clarify: were these commissioned 'studies' per se, or, as your slide suggests, just reviews of the contact tracing data you already had? In which case, what were the parameters and guidelines for contact tracers at the time of the records under review?

1/ Good afternoon BC, today we will pre-empt media questions and just answer some queries we have been sent personally. You are probably wondering how exactly the public is communicating with us personally but let's not get distracted VACCINES! 2/ Firstly, and we get asked this a lot... Vaccines. Yes, they are. And we are learning more every day, and we're watching very closely. Remember that it's us and the vaccines. And each other. And when we're together, apart, we can only be stronger.

1/ BC's response to the entirely foreseeable exponential growth of variant-Covid has included scoldings, platitudes, half-measures emphasizing 'personal choice', a comms breakdown re masks in schools, and the ill-timed closure of a ski resort with an outbreak AFTER spring break. 2/ Hmm, you may be thinking, those things sound kind of weak, tepid, highly disorganized and possibly negligent in the face of dangerously transmissible variants, growing hospital admissions and a largely unvaccinated population. You would be right.