The province reported 564 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, including 35 new cases in the Island Health region. Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said the province is seeing an uptick . . .
“I think, by the summer, we are going to be able to be doing a lot more of those connections that we need that are going to help us get through the trauma we have all experienced together.” Henry said expected shipments of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine 60,000 doses are scheduled to arrive next week and the promise of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, now under review, will move up the timeline to ensure everyone who wants one gets a first dose by early summer, rather than September. Next week’s shipment of AstraZeneca doses will be targeted to areas where there are clusters and outbreaks of COVID-19.
B.C. officials said earlier this week that they expect all eligible British Columbians to have been vaccinated by the end of July. In order to do that, the province will need to increase more than tenfold the number of people that health officials vaccinate each day, to around 26,666. Health officials administered 6,627 doses of vaccine in the past day, to 6,543 new people, and a mere 84 second doses to individuals who have already had their first doses. Provincial health officer Bonnie Henry and others have explained that the new strategy is to focus first on vaccinating people with single doses, and to leave second doses until as long as 112 days after the first dose because of supply shortages. The rationale for this tactic is also that first doses provide significant immunity and it is smarter to vaccinate as many people as possible with first doses, to limit the spread of COVID-19, than to focus on having people fully immunized with two doses.
Two more British Columbians lost their lives while suffering from COVID-19, pushing the province s death toll from the virus to 1,365, provincial health officer Bonnie Henry said March 2. That . . .