Hinshaw warns Albertans "have work to do" as 843 new COVID-19 cases reported
Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health warned Albertans they’ll need to make important choices in the coming weeks to get the pandemic curve under control as the province reported another 843 COVID-19 cases Tuesday.
At her first live briefing of 2021, Dr. Deena Hinshaw said case numbers are stabilizing but hospital and ICU admissions remain high, meaning the province’s healthcare system is still strained.
“I think we all look forward to this year bringing us closer to our old normal,” she said. “But we have work to do to get there.”
She implored Albertans to keep following public health restrictions but avoided condemning the provincial politicians for their holiday cross-boarder travel.
“We’re really sick and tired of COVID-19, and sometimes that leads to lapses in judgement,” she said.
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Alberta’s positivity rate remains above 8%, a figure health officials would like to see remain below 5%. Fewer people got tested over the holidays, so data from that period may not be as reliable for making decisions about whether to lift restrictions, Hinshaw added.
Another 26 Albertans died of COVID-19 in the past day, bringing the province’s death toll to more than 1,100.
Right now there are 919 people in hospital, including 140 in the ICU.
Alberta currently has 13,411 active COVID-19 cases, and 106,378 people in the province have caught the virus since the pandemic began.
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