Saturday January 22, 2022 | VICTORIA, BC
by Mary P Brooke, B.Sc. | Island Social Trends
The BC Immunization program is robust. On Vancouver Island, there were 40,132 shots administered during Monday to Friday of this past week — January 17 to 21.
That’s about 8,026 shots per day! Busy health-care workers!
Mostly Moderna:
The week’s total of administered shots in Island Health was comprised of mostly Moderna booster doses, totaling to 35,047 this week. Total Moderna shots administered since vaccines became available in December 2020 comes to 314,966.
Moderna booster shots are 50 mcg (half of the 100 mcg doses given for first and second dose of Moderna). Pfizer booster shots (3,404 given this week) are 30 mcg (same dosage level as for first and second doses).
One of the reasons Moderna is offered as the adult booster dose is because available Pfizer supply is being used for the pediatric shots.
Pediatric Pfizer more on weekends:
The weekends tend to see a lot of the pediatric Pfizer doses administered, when kids are off school and parents are off work.
The pediatric Pfizer product is available to children ages 5 to 11 years. The dosage level is 10 mcg (one third as much as the dosage level administered to anyone age 12+).
See BC Health info on dosage levels.
COVID shots January 17-21 in Island Health:
Here’s the breakdown for this past week:
| Vaccine Type | 1st Dose | 2nd Dose | 3rd Dose (booster) | TOTAL Administered Pandemic to Date | 5 days (Jan 17-21) |
| All | 808 | 873 | 38,451 | 1,758,270 up from 1,718,138 | 40,132 |
| AstraZeneca | 68 | 42 | 0 | 36,065 up from 35,955 | 110 |
| Moderna | 323 | 406 | 35,047 | 714,651 up from 678,845 | 35,806 |
| Pfizer (adult) | 340 | 406 | 3,404 | 977,687 up from 973,537 | 4,150 |
| Pfizer (pediatric) | 77 | 19 | 0 | 29,867 up from 29,771 | 96 |
First-time doses:
Congratulations to the 808 people in Island Health who got their first doses this week! Most of them were the adult doses of the mRNA vaccines Pfizer (340) and Moderna (323), with 68 being AstraZeneca and 77 were pediatric Pfizer.
Still a pandemic, edging toward endemic:
Yesterday in a livestreamed BC COVID update, Provincial Health Officer Dr Bonnie Henry said that BC is still very much in a COVID pandemic but due to the high transmissibility of the Omicron variant it’s impossible to keep track of case numbers.
Contact tracing is not possible with the Omicron variant’s three to five-day incubation period, she said. Testing had already reached capacity (approximately 20,000 per day) a few weeks ago.
Yesterday the BC Centre for Disease Control (BC CDC) dashboard format changed. Total cases by age are broken down by gender but not presented as a total. This makes it much harder to keep track of total cases (other than to see the total presented at the top of the dashboard).
