Everything you need to know about COVID-19 in Alberta on Monday, Jan. 4

The latest:

• More than 5,000 new cases of COVID-19 were reported in Alberta over the past five days, as the positivity rate remains high and hospitalizations continue to increase. 
• The province now has 13,839 active cases, with 905 people in hospital, 136 in intensive care. The positivity rate as of Sunday was 9.4 per cent, and the provincewide R-value was 0.99. Fewer tests were completed over the holidays. 
• Another 96 people have died, including a health-care worker in the Calgary zone, for a total of 1,142 deaths. 
• Premier Jason Kenney has accepted the resignations of Grande Prairie MLA Tracy Allard as minister of municipal affairs and Jamie Huckabay as his chief of staff. In a Facebook post Monday, Kenney said he has also demoted five other UCP MLAs who travelled internationally over the holidays. 
• Calgary-Klein MLA Jeremy Nixon has been stripped from his position as parliamentary secretary for civil society. Red Deer-South MLA Jason Stephan has been removed from Treasury Board. 
• Three MLAs — Calgary-Peigan's Tanya Fir, Tany Yao of Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo and Lesser Slave Lake's Pat Rehn — have been removed from the legislature committees they have sat on. 
• Transportation Minister Ric McIver will take over municipal affairs until a new minister is appointed, Kenney said. Larry Kaumeyer, the current principal secretary, will serve as interim chief of staff. 
• Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta's chief medical officer of health, is scheduled to hold her next news conference on Tuesday.
• In spite of the pandemic's crippling effect on many local businesses, the City of Edmonton said it gave out 4,736 new business licences between March 1 and Nov. 30 in 2020.
• A health-care aide at an extended care facility in Red Deer, Alta., has been charged under the Federal Quarantine Act after allegedly failing to isolate after a trip to the United States.
• Students are set to return to in-person classes on Jan. 11, Education Minister Adriana LaGrange confirmed on Twitter on Monday. 

• It took nearly nine months for Alberta to record its first 500 deaths; the next 500 came in just 34 days. Check out how it happened in this analysis.

• Here are more of the latest Alberta COVID-19 stories:
  • Two more UCP MLAs returning to Alberta from trips abroad
  • Conservative MP has travelled to California twice since March for 'essential house maintenance'
  • Calgary councillors say they stayed home, stayed safe amid politician travel controversy
  • Kenney orders MLAs not to leave Canada unless on government business after minister's vacation
  • More than 4,000 new Edmonton businesses open during pandemic
  • Pandemic inactivity causing rise in injuries, say Alberta practitioners

More detail on what you need to know today in Alberta

After a break in reporting detailed case data, Alberta has now shared the latest COVID-19 data from the past five days. 

Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta's chief medical officer of health, has said fewer tests were completed over the holidays. Hospitalizations have continued to increase and the positivity rate remains high. Hinshaw's next live update is scheduled for Tuesday.

Here's how many new cases were reported and tests completed over the past five days:

• WEDNESDAY: 1,226 new cases, 16,867 tests done, 7.3 per cent positivity rate.
• THURSDAY: 1,361 new cases, 16,347 tests done, 8.3 per cent positivity rate.
• FRIDAY: 933 new cases, 12,719 tests done, 7.3 per cent positivity rate. 
• SATURDAY: 459 new cases, 8,112 tests done, 5.7 per cent positivity rate.
• SUNDAY: 1,280 new cases, 11,963 tests done, 9.4 per cent positivity rate. 

Another 96 people have died, including a health-care worker in the Calgary zone, for a total of 1,142 deaths. The province now has 13,839 active cases, with 905 people in hospital, 136 in intensive care. The provincewide R-value was 0.99; in Edmonton it was 0.92, and 1.02 in Calgary. 

Students are set to return to in-person classes on Jan. 11, Education Minister Adriana LaGrange confirmed on Twitter on Monday. 

Premier Jason Kenney has accepted the resignations of Grande Prairie MLA Tracy Allard as minister of municipal affairs and Jamie Huckabay as his chief of staff.  

In a Facebook post Monday, Kenney said he has also demoted five other UCP MLAs who travelled internationally over the holidays. 

Calgary-Klein MLA Jeremy Nixon has been stripped from his position as parliamentary secretary for civil society. Red Deer-South MLA Jason Stephan has been removed from Treasury Board. 

Three MLAs — Calgary-Peigan's Tanya Fir, Tany Yao of Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo and Lesser Slave Lake's Pat Rehn — have been removed from the legislature committees they have sat on. 

Transportation Minister Ric McIver will take over municipal affairs until a new minister is appointed, Kenney said. Larry Kaumeyer, the current principal secretary, will serve as interim chief of staff. 

"Millions of Albertans have made real sacrifices over the past 10 months to help keep each other safe. They are right to be angry about people in positions of leadership vacationing outside of the country," Kenney wrote. 

"By travelling abroad over the holidays, these individuals demonstrated extremely poor judgment."

Click on the map below to zoom in or out on specific local geographic areas in Alberta and find out more about COVID-19 there:

Here is the detailed regional breakdown of active cases as of Monday. 

• Calgary zone: 4,700, down from 5,129 reported on Wednesday (35,322 recovered).
• Edmonton zone: 5,983, down from 6,624 (38,722 recovered).
• North zone: 1,284, up from 1,031 (6,106 recovered).
• South zone: 266, down from 296 (4,769 recovered). 
• Central zone: 1,523, up from 1,430 (5,499 recovered).
• Unknown: 83, up from 45 (136 recovered).

Find out which neighbourhoods or communities have the most cases, how hard people of different ages have been hit, the ages of people in hospital, how Alberta compares to other provinces and more in: Here are the latest COVID-19 statistics for Alberta — and what they mean

Calgary-Signal Hill Conservative MP Ron Liepert travelled twice to Palm Desert, Calif., since March, his office confirmed Saturday, so he could deal with "essential house maintenance issues."

Liepert, who was Alberta's health and wellness minister under Premier Ed Stelmach, owns a home in the city, which is located in the Coachella Valley.

A spokesperson in Liepert's office said Liepert has travelled twice since March, including during the current parliamentary recess.

"There has been no non-essential travel, and he has complied with all public health guidance, including the Alberta border testing program, each time he has travelled," the spokesperson said in an email.

The spokesperson did not immediately return a request from CBC News inquiring what specific maintenance Liepert had to resolve at his Palm Desert home.

Some city councillors in Calgary are expressing disappointment with provincial politicians and staff who went against public health recommendations to travel recreationally over the holidays.

At least six UCP MLAs and two senior provincial staffers left Canada on vacation in December, as did one Conservative MP from the province.

"Leaders know that it's essential to build trust during a crisis if we want the public to follow the rules. This blatant disregard by the very people in charge of public health shows incredible disrespect to essential workers and all those who have been sacrificing for the common good," Coun. Druh Farrell told CBC News. 

Some jokingly addressed the issue, like Coun. Jeromy Farkas, who posted a photo of himself with a Dec. 31 newspaper in Calgary, or Coun. Sean Chu, who confirmed in a text that he was doing what many are doing this holiday season — "staying home and getting fat."

Global Affairs Canada advised Canadians against non-essential travel outside the country until further notice. Alberta also advises against non-essential travel on its travel restrictions page.

How did things go so wrong, so quickly in Alberta? It's all about exponential growth, notes CBC investigative journalist Robson Fletcher. 

Early on in 2020, Alberta was getting accustomed to looking across the country and feeling pride in its successful pandemic response, but now the province finds itself in uncharted territory. After keeping the disease relatively at bay for months, deferred decisions late in the year led to an unprecedented amount of illness and death.

In the spring, the province boasted about its low hospitalization rate, its nation-leading testing and how it had quadrupled its ranks of contact tracers.

Come winter, Alberta had the highest hospitalization rate in the country and test-positivity rates that were nearing 10 per cent. Thousands of people were told to do their own contact tracing after the provincial system was overwhelmed.

Medical experts and mathematicians tried to sound the alarm nearly two months ago about the trajectory the province was on. But the government was reluctant to impose new restrictions on Albertans' liberties and economic activity. It rebuffed repeated calls for stricter public-health measures — for a time.

Meanwhile, the exponential growth continued unabated, with the number of new daily cases doubling every two to three weeks. Whether in response to the physicians' warnings, or the fact that new case numbers were approaching the psychological barrier of 2,000 per day, the government eventually did act.

But by that time, the hospitalizations and deaths the province is now experiencing had been essentially baked in. Daily case counts have mercifully started to ebb, but the glut of disease that built up weeks ago is still filling more hospital beds and claiming more lives than Alberta has seen at any other point in the pandemic.

Pandemic-related injuries and demand for treatment are on the rise as more Albertans work from home and move around less, say practitioners who treat them.

"There are a lot of injuries that are cropping up in my clinic that are related to inactivity, more so than before," said Joey Mo, a physiotherapist and owner of Honest Physiotherapy Clinic in Edmonton.

"We're seeing a lot of injuries related to stiffness, low back pain, disc problems for people sitting all day, headaches associated with being hunched at your computer all day."

Mo said current restrictions mean Albertans are no longer getting out as they once did to shop, see friends or go to the gym. Others, he said, who were once active at work — in a warehouse, for example — are now relegated to desk jobs.

"People are getting their backs injured and having nerve pain down their legs," Mo said. "But these are things that could be avoided with proper ergonomics, making sure that you're getting up every once in a while, taking a bit of a break."

Since returning to work after the lockdown in the spring, Mo said he's faced a massive backlog. Increased demand for physiotherapy is also likely due to restrictions imposed on other services such as massage therapy, he added.

• For the latest on what's happening in the rest of Canada and around the world on Sunday, see here.