The day Alberta’s chief medical officer of health announced the province is pressing pause on a plan to significantly scale back COVID-19 testing and contact tracing and to no longer require people with the disease to self-isolate, the province announced it has identified 582 new coronavirus cases.
With the new cases, Alberta’s total number of active COVID-19 cases had reached 4,438 by Friday afternoon. Of those cases, 1,790 are in the Calgary zone, 1,063 are in the Edmonton zone, 639 are in the South zone, 623 are in the North zone, 313 are in the Central zone and 10 are not linked to any particular zone.
The number of people in Alberta hospitals with COVID-19 also rose on Friday up to 152, six more than the previous day. Of those, 37 people are in intensive care.
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As of Friday, the number of Albertans who have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic began was at 2,332, up one from Thursday.
The most recently published R-values on the Alberta government’s website was for the period from Aug. 2 to Aug. 8. In that time frame, the provincial R-value was at 1.25.
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As of Friday, Alberta had administered 5,423,834 doses of COVID-19 vaccine. Of eligible Albertans 12 and older, 76.7 per cent have received at least one dose of vaccine, while 67.5 per cent are fully vaccinated.
On Friday morning, Hinshaw said the province was holding off on her controversial plan to drop COVID-19 protocols on Monday in order to “monitor and assess before taking a step forward.”
“If monitoring confirms our original expectations that a rise in cases will not lead to high levels of hospitalizations, and we do not see evidence of increased risk for severe disease for children, we will proceed with implementing this next set of changes after Sept. 27,” she said.
Hinshaw said data on pediatric COVID-19 cases associated with the Delta variant in the U.S., combined with an unexpected rise in hospitalizations, prompted her to delay the planned changes.
She noted Alberta has not seen the same rise in severe COVID-19 cases among young people as in parts of the U.S.
“To date, we have not seen a similar rise in severe cases in youth here in Alberta. Since July 1, we have only had seven cases in hospital under the age of 18.”
–With files from The Canadian Press’ Alanna Smith
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