Nisha Yunus, a residential care aide at Providence Health Care, is injected with a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTEch COVID-19 vaccine by Christina Cordova, a regional immunization clinical resource nurse in Vancouver, Dec. 15, 2020.JENNIFER GAUTHIER/Reuters
As the first recipients of the COVID vaccine in British Columbia rolled up their sleeves on Tuesday, Premier John Horgan said the province is flattening the curve in the second wave of the pandemic.
B.C. is administering almost 4,000 Pfizer vaccines to Lower Mainland health care workers who work in long-term care homes and in acute care, but as the vaccine supply trickles in, there will still be months of uncertainty before the province can offer a broad vaccination program. In the meantime, Mr. Horgan said British Columbians will face stricter enforcement to ensure they follow COVID safety protocols over the coming holiday season.
“If you’re not prepared to follow the rules, if you’re going to look for loopholes, there will be consequences for that,” he told reporters on Tuesday. Enforcement agencies including Conservation Officers and WorkSafe BC are being tapped to ensure public-health orders are being followed, he said.
“We’ve flattened out comfortably in terms of the raw number, but the raw numbers are just too high,” he said. B.C. has been recording roughly 700 new cases each day over the past two weeks, and he said the arrival of the vaccine “does not mean we throw our masks up in the air today.”
However, he added that if British Columbians follow the current restrictions that prohibit non-essential travel and social gatherings, “we will be in a much better position come January, when we all turn the page on this tragic year and start focusing with hope and optimism on a better future in 2021.”
A recent Angus Reid poll found that among Canadians, British Columbians have the highest rate of willingness to get the COVID vaccine as soon as they can. But the province has established a priority list based on risk and is telling residents to wait to be contacted by public-health officials before they can get in line.
Mr. Horgan said the first doses of the vaccine are being distributed in the Lower Mainland where COVID case loads are the highest.
But he said the province is eagerly awaiting Health Canada approval of a second vaccine, made by Moderna, which will be easier to transport because it does not require ultracold storage. “As we get Moderna and other vaccines that are easier to transport, that we can use effectively, we will then move into long-term care facilities and then start moving down the line,” he said.
B.C. has identified long-term care residents and staff, health care workers dealing with COVID patients, Indigenous people living in rural or remote communities, high-risk people living in group settings such as shelters and people over the age of 80 as the first priority groups to receive vaccination.
The second phase of the vaccine program includes a large population and Mr. Horgan said it is too early to say how B.C. will distribute the vaccines among the different groups. It is expected that in the spring, public health will begin to offer vaccines to older people under 80, as well as other health care workers who were not in the first round, plus police, firefighters and paramedics. The list also includes people working in the kindergarten-to-Grade 12 school system, child-care providers, and people working in grocery stores, transportation, manufacturing and production facilities.
The head of the BC Teachers’ Federation, Teri Mooring, is calling for teachers to be treated as frontline workers to be in the priority order to receive the vaccines, but the Premier would not say if her members would be in line before others in the second phase.
“Government will obviously grapple with those issues but I wouldn’t want, today, with the first shot, to start predicting where and how we will be distributing vaccines in February and March,” Mr. Horgan said, adding that B.C. will have to await distribution from Ottawa.
The Premier said he is optimistic that by next summer, enough people will have been vaccinated so that B.C. can finally put the pandemic restrictions aside.
“We don’t anticipate that the COVID pandemic will be with us come the summer of 2021,” he said. “That is my fervent hope, and that’s the expectation, I think, of all British Columbians.”
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