B.C. is cutting down the timeline between first and second vaccine doses, as COVID-19 cases rise in the province.
Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says people can now receive a vaccine dose 28 days after receiving their first, instead of 49 days, starting tomorrow.
This change had been brought into effect for the Central Okanagan Local Health Area in late July when a COVID-19 outbreak was declared in the Kelowna area. But the shortened interval between doses is now in place province-wide.
Henry says about 170,000 people who received a first dose more than 28 days ago will now start being invited to book a second dose.
Health Minister Adrian Dix says the provincial system will be sending about 5,000 vaccine appointments per hour, meaning it will likely take until Wednesday for invites to be sent out to people who are now eligible.
As of Monday, Dix says more than 82 per cent of people 12 and older in B.C. have received a first vaccine dose, and says now 70.3 per cent of those residents are fully vaccinated.
At time of posting, COVID-19 case information from the weekend had not been released, but cases have continued to rise significantly in recent days and weeks.
On Friday, there were 464 new cases, and the 2,411 active cases are the most in two months. Much of the new cases are being driven by the Kelowna-area outbreak, which Henry has said has almost exclusively affected people between 20 and 40 years old who are unvaccinated or have only received one dose.
The Delta variant, which originated in India, is now the dominant variant in B.C. and accounts for 99 per cent of cases in Interior Health, and about 90 per cent in all other health authorities.
While the Delta variant has been found to spread much easier than other strains of COVID-19, breakthrough cases in people who are fully vaccinated have accounted for only five per cent of cases in B.C., health officials said last week. And the variant has not, to date, caused a large rise in hospitalizations or deaths, as many of the most at-risk people in B.C. have been fully vaccinated for several months.
