If This is Success, What Would Failure Look Like?

Looking at my home turf of Vancouver Island

I remember back at the start of last summer, the BC Government was saying, if we could just get more people vaccinated, the COVID pandemic would be pretty much over by September. How did that work out?

I'm most interested in seeing how the COVID pandemic has unfolded here where I live, on Vancouver Island.

Vancouver Island had a really easy time of it during the first 17 months of the pandemic. Here's how things stood as of August 14th, 2021, according to the BC Centre for Disease Control:

On the above charts, 'VIHA' stands for Vancouver Island Health Authority.

By 17 months weeks into the pandemic, there had been a total of 5,757 cases and 41 deaths on Vancouver Island. Vancouver Island has a population of 850,000, so less than one percent of the population had been infected with COVID despite 75 weeks of pandemic conditions. It is useful to remember that for the first nine months of that period, no-one was vaccinated, with gradually increasing vaccinations over the subsequent eight months.

There were so few cases, many of us here on the Island referred jokingly to having lived through a 'nondemic.' We groused about the fact that our heavy-handed Provincial Government had shut down gyms and restaurants here when we had a only a fraction of the rate of cases on the mainland.

There was a period in the Spring of 2021 where BC restricted people from travelling between regions in BC, and active cases on Vancouver Island dropped precipitously. By early June, it looked like Vancouver Island was only three or four weeks from being COVID-free. The BC Government rescued us from that horrible fate by scrapping regional travel restrictions on June 15th.

By July 16th, 2021 more than a million doses of COVID vaccines had been given on Vancouver Island. Seventy-eight percent of people over age twelve had received at least one shot, and 47% of the eligible population had been fully vaccinated. An incredible 92% of those over age 70 had had at least one jab.

By August 19th, 81% of eligible Island Health residents had received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine and 74% were fully-vaccinated with two doses, well above the 70% partial vaccination rate the BC Government had set as a target to bring the pandemic to a rapid conclusion.

So, what has happened in the intervening 16 weeks? Here's the most recent COVID dashboard for Vancouver Island on December 2nd:

Were now up to a total of 12, 971 cases and 124 deaths on the Island. If we subtract the cases and deaths up to August 14th, we find the most recent 16 weeks saw 7,216 cases, and 83 deaths.

Let's put the results in a table so we can compare the two periods of time:

It's like we've suddenly been dropped into a whole different pandemic! The case rate for the most recent 16 weeks is more than 5 times the case rate in the first seventeen months of the pandemic. The death rate is an incredible ten times what it was earlier in the pandemic. Even the case fatality rate has shot way up.

How do we explain all this? Yes, we could blame it all on the Delta Variant, but then we'd have to avoid looking at how other jurisdictions have been doing in coping with the Delta Variant.

Take Bangladesh, for example. Most recent stats for that country of 167 million people have 7-day averages of 213 daily cases and 2 daily deaths. If Bangladesh had the population of Vancouver Island, they'd be seeing 8 cases per week, and 0.07 deaths per week. This in an impoverished country with only 35 percent of its population vaccinated! (I've picked Bangladesh, but there are literally dozens of countries with case and death rates lower than BC, despite having often much lower vaccination rates.)

How come higher rates of vaccination haven't translated into fewer cases and deaths? The BC Government has tried very hard to blame the unvaxxed for what is happening.

While it is true that the majority of new cases are not fully vaccinated, as are the majority of those in hospital, the math of the situation strongly argues against the unvaxed being the group that has been the primary driver of the spread of the Delta Variant.

Back on July 16, 53% of the Island was not fully vaccinated. Most recent stats are that " 91.2 per cent of those 12 and older in B.C. have received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, 88 per cent a second dose and 10 per cent a third dose." In other words, the not-fully-vaccinated population is now down to 12% of those over 12 years old.

What that means is that the pool of not-fully-vaccinated individuals on Vancouver Island is now less than one-quarter over what it was back in the middle of July. If the primary driver of infection was unvaccinated individuals we should have seen a huge drop in both cases and deaths by now. We most certainly would not be seeing the 96 new cases we had on Vancouver Island last Friday.

It's all well and good to try to blame the unvaccinated for what has happened, but what we're seeing on Vancouver Island is part of a global trend. There's a strong trend that countries with the highest rates of vaccination are also seeing the highest number of cases. This trend was first noticed in Israel, then Guam, Vermont, Ireland, and Gibraltar. (Gibraltar, with more than 99% of it's population fully-vaccinated has had to cancel Christmas events due to an upsurge in COVID cases.) Most recently Germany, Denmark and Norway have been added to the list of highly-vaccinated countries experiencing a big surge in COVID cases.

How could that be? The fundamental problem is that the available COVID vaccines are all leaky and temporary. Fully-vaccinated individuals can have breakthrough infections and then are just as effective at spreading the Delta Variant as unvaccinated individuals.

That brings us to the nub of the problem: vaccinated individuals are usually asymptomatic or experience only very mild symptoms, so they spread the Delta Variant without realizing they are doing so. Most recent data suggests that the Delta Variant is actually less often fatal than earlier variants of COVID. If the apparent case fatality on Vancouver Island is 50% higher than it used to be, what that suggests to me is that a large proportion of vaccinated people with breakthrough cases of COVID are going undiagnosed, and that it is this large number of undiagnosed break-through cases which has been driving up the numbers of cases and deaths on Vancouver Island.

Extremely low numbers of cases during the first 17 months of the pandemic indicate that the Vancouver Island Health Authority staff did a good job of reining in the pandemic over the first seventeen months with a rigorous track and trace program. I suspect that the abject failure of track and trace over the past sixteen weeks is not because the VIHA staff have slacked off. A much more likely explanation is that track and trace techniques are going to be far less effective if most of the people spreading the virus are asymptomatic and haven't been tested for COVID.

There's one other thing I'm quite curious about. Though the BC Government has talked a lot about how the unvaccinated make up the majority new cases and hospital admissions, they have been remarkably silent on who has been dying of COVID.

I did some digging through the BC CDC records, and found, looking at data for BC as a whole, just over two-thirds of those dying in the most recent 14 weeks were over the age of 70. The fully-vaccinated rate in people over seventy in BC has to be well over 95% percent by now. I have to suspect that most of the people over 70 dying of COVID are fully vaccinated.

Recent weeks have also seen 162 deaths in care homes. I have to strongly suspect that virtually all those people were fully vaccinated.

We know that vaccines are less-effective with older people, especially men, than for young people, and with waning vaccine efficiency we would expect to see an increasing number of deaths in the over 70 population.

What all that suggests to me is that the majority of people dying in recent weeks have been fully-vaccinated, and the Government of BC hasn't bothered to tell us because it doesn't fit their official narrative of vaccinated=good/unvaccinated=bad. It would be helpful if someone from the press could raise that issue with our Provincial Health Officer.

BC shares one other characteristic with the many other jurisdictions that are seeing very high case rates simultaneous with high COVID cases. BC put all their eggs in one basket, assuming that higher vaccination rates are the one and only way to rein in the COVID pandemic.

Our BC Government is so ideologically committed to the concept that no early treatment for COVID is possible that it is still actively discouraging vitamin D supplementation as a COVID treatment despite abundant evidence that high levels of serum Vitamin D are extremely protective against hospitalization or death from COVID.

The countries that are showing the best success in combatting the delta variant have taken a more broad-based approach. They often have more rigorous track and trace programs. They invest a lot more energy in early treatment of COVID cases. They also tend to do prophylactic treatment of close contacts of infected individuals.

Japan is a country seeing low numbers of cases and deaths recently despite a relatively high rate of vaccination (Almost 78% fully vaccinated as opposed to 88% in BC.) They are much more actively engaged in trying to find effective early treatment protocols, including recently approving the use of ivermectin.

Japan with its 125 million people is now seeing an average of 107 daily cases and one death daily. If Japan had the population of Vancouver Island, they would be seeing 5 cases per week, and 0.05 deaths In other words, Japan’s current death rate is 1/1000th of what we've been seeing on Vancouver Island in recent weeks.

For weeks now we’ve seen the BC Government patting itself on the back over its ‘success’ in bullying the unvaxxed to get vaccinated. When I look at skyrocketing case and death rates on my home turf of Vancouver Island, I am left with only one question: If this is success, what would failure look like?

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PS: A shorter version of this more suitable for newspaper use is available on my personal website at newsnongrata.com