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Alberta saw a jump in hospitalizations of people with COVID-19 by 35 since the last report, which now brings the total number of people in hospital to 584, with 129 in the ICU.
This comes after another 1,592 news cases were reported, bringing the total cases to 180,369, and five more deaths which brings the total to 2,064.
The increase in hospitalizations is worrisome but predictable. Over the last year, Alberta Health recorded 41 people admitted to the hospital and 11 deaths for every 1,000 people who tested positive for COVID-19.
Many experts expect the death rate to go down, now that many of the oldest and most vulnerable Albertans are vaccinated. But with the new variants circulating, many are watching the hospitalization rate. Doctors have seen younger patients getting sicker when infected with the new variants.
On Friday Health Minister Tyler Shandro said “we knew this was going to be the storm before the calm.”
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Shandro went on to say that they don’t have any recommendations from Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, for tightening restrictions, adding the government had anticipated a rise in COVID-19 cases after the Easter long weekend.
“We knew this was going to happen. We made it very public that we were expecting, even after we tightened restrictions for two or three weeks, that we would see a continued increase in cases,” Shandro said.
There are now 1,132 new variant cases identified in the province, meaning of the 19,702 active cases, 11,999 — 60.9 per cent — are variant cases.
There are now a total of 158,603 recovered cases across the province and as of the end of day Friday, 1,361,365 doses of vaccine have been administered with only 239 reporting adverse events, and 267,195 Albertans are fully immunized.
Ontario and Alberta currently have the worst outbreaks in Canada when measured in new cases per capita.
There are a total of 1,172,004 cases of COVID-19 across Canada with a total of 23,927 deaths.
