What you need to know about COVID-19 in Alberta on Monday, Sept. 14
Doctors keep a close eye on kids' mental health as school resumes during pandemic
The latest:
- The province reported 418 new cases over the weekend, bringing its active case tally to 1,538, up 94 from Friday's total of 1,444.
- A total of 37 people are being treated in hospital, seven are in intensive care, and one more person has died — a woman in her 70s in Edmonton.
- Seven Alberta schools have reported outbreaks as of Monday: Notre Dame High School in northeast Calgary, Ross Sheppard High School in west Edmonton, Henry Wise Wood High School in southwest Calgary, St. Wilfrid Elementary in northeast Calgary, Auburn Bay School in southeast Calgary, Lester B. Pearson High School in northeast Calgary and Chinook School in Lethbridge.
- There have been 42 cases present at 35 schools while infectious, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the province's chief medical officer of health, said Monday.
- AHS guidelines define an outbreak as two or more confirmed cases at the same school within 14 days.
- The province announced the launch of an online map to help parents track COVID-19 outbreaks in schools across the province. Hinshaw said it will be updated each afternoon with information validated in the morning.
- A Calgary coffee shop has been reprimanded by AHS again for breaking COVID-19 rules.
- To deal with delays, backlogs and rising demand for testing as schools reopen, Alberta Health Services (AHS) is looking for dozens of new employees to help with COVID-19 contact tracing and testing.
- A new record was set over the weekend, with close to 19,000 tests on Saturday. Hinshaw said additional staff were brought in to deal with the increase.
- Albertans can now sign up to be notified of test results by text message to reduce wait times, Hinshaw said on Thursday. According to the AHS screening site, it is the fastest way to receive results.
What you need to know today in Alberta:
Nearly a year and a half after forming government, the United Conservative Party (UCP) finds itself in unfamiliar territory — tied with Alberta's NDP Opposition, according to a new poll.
The government has found itself juggling precarious back-to-school plans, a still unstable economic recovery and a protracted dispute with Alberta's doctors.
Among issues surveyed, 56 per cent of Albertans think their provincial government has done a "good job" handling COVID-19. That compares with 77 per cent of Canadians in other provinces.
Six months since most businesses were ordered by the province to close due to COVID-19, many small- and medium-sized business owners still face huge uncertainties about whether their business can outlive the pandemic.
A Calgary coffee shop has been reprimanded again for breaking COVID-19 rules, months after it was ordered to suspend services after breaking COVID-19 seating rules.
In an order dated Sept. 8, an Alberta Health Services officer wrote that tables at the outdoor patio and inside the dining area of the Purple Perk in Mission were less than two metres apart. He also wrote that customers were seated directly back-to-back and side-by-side in both areas.
Kids Help Phone, a national service providing supports by phone and text, says demand is up 44 per cent in Alberta over this time last year as thousands of children are settling back into classrooms. The agency says many are struggling with issues ranging from pandemic-related stress to full-blown mental health disorders.
In an effort to decrease wait times for COVID-19 test results, which have an estimated turnaround time of seven to 10 days, Albertans can now sign up to receive their result by text message. The new system will give people the ability to be notified as soon as the lab result is available, Dr. Deena Hinshaw said Thursday. According to the AHS website, is the fastest way to receive results.
"We are working hard to streamline every facet of the testing and notification process to reduce wait times across the province," she said.
Hinshaw said a newly launched online map will list every school with an outbreak. It will be updated in the afternoon with information validated in the morning, and if an outbreak is declared later that day, the map won't be updated until the following afternoon.
It will be used to track cases only when an infectious person has been present in school. But Hinshaw said, if needed in the future, the map would also list schools that have shifted into Scenario 2 or 3 to protect the health of students.
"Other numbers are not relevant to school transmission risk, and simply cause confusion and anxiety."
Hinshaw said students and staff are being asked to isolate if they come into close contact with an infectious case, which means spending 15 minutes or more near that person. She says as of yet, no one has picked up an infection from a school.
AHS said that a single case in a school population is not considered an outbreak, so no case-specific details will be shared.
Out of 23,000 test samples collected for a study between Dec. 1, 2019, and March 7, 2020, one individual who had returned from travel in the United States is Alberta's only "retrospective" case of the illness, Hinshaw said.
Those tests, which were looking for other respiratory illnesses such as influenza, were used earlier this summer by Alberta Health Services and Alberta Precision Laboratories for a retrospective study that found only a single case, which was detected in a sample taken on Feb. 24.
That was less than two weeks before the province reported its first case of COVID-19 on March 5.
"The fact that we found only a single retrospective case and that it was detected not long before March 5 is positive news," Hinshaw said.
CBC News is following four families as they navigate the return to school in the midst of the global pandemic, tracing how the reopening impacts them before and during the return. Here's the first installment: Getting ready for school.
CBC Calgary also wants to hear from Alberta's parents, students and teachers in regards to how the process has gone so far.
Here's the regional breakdown of active cases reported on Monday.
- Calgary zone: 557, down from 560 on Friday.
- Edmonton zone: 654, up from 580.
- North zone: 232, up from 213.
- Central zone: 49, up from 45.
- South zone: 38, unchanged.
- Unknown: 8, unchanged.
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
What you need to know today in Canada:
As of 5:15 a.m. ET on Monday, Canada had 136,659 confirmed or presumptive coronavirus cases. Provinces and territories listed 120,431 of those as recovered or resolved. A CBC News tally of deaths based on provincial reports, regional health information and CBC's reporting stood at 9,211.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is urging Canadians to be vigilant in following public health guidelines as COVID-19 cases climb across the country.
Speaking with reporters before a two-day cabinet retreat in Ottawa, Trudeau warned that as the number of new infections rises, "we are not out of the woods" when it comes to the health crisis.
Ontario's COVID-19 cases are rising at a rate not seen for months, upping the pressure on Premier Doug Ford's government and public health officials to take fresh action to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
The average number of new COVID-19 infections confirmed daily in the province has doubled in a stretch of just three weeks.
A surprisingly high proportion of COVID-19 cases in Ontario have been among women working in health care, according to a new report that experts say intensifies calls for better protection.The researchers linked provincial COVID-19 test results from more than 624,000 individuals in Ontario to federal data on 2.6 million immigrants and 549,000 refugees who arrived from 1985 to 2017.
Among all adult females in the study who tested positive for COVID-19, 36 per cent were employed as health-care workers. Of those, a further 45 per cent were immigrants and refugees, with those born in the Philippines, Jamaica and Nigeria accounting for the bulk of cases, the researchers reported on Wednesday.
The Bank of Canada says the economic recovery from COVID-19 will need help from policymakers, which is why the central bank is committing to keeping its benchmark interest rate at 0.25 per cent for as long as necessary.
Self-assessment and supports:
Alberta Health Services has an online self-assessment tool that you can use to determine if you have symptoms of COVID-19, but testing is open to anyone, even without symptoms.
The province says Albertans who have returned to Canada from other countries must self-isolate. Unless your situation is critical and requires a call to 911, Albertans are advised to call Health Link at 811 before visiting a physician, hospital or other health-care facility.
If you have symptoms, even mild, you are to self-isolate for at least 10 days from the onset of symptoms, until the symptoms have disappeared.
You can find Alberta Health Services' latest coronavirus updates here.
The province also operates a confidential mental health support line at 1-877-303-2642 and addiction help line at 1-866-332-2322, both available 24 hours a day.
Online resources are available for advice on handling stressful situations and ways to talk with children.
There is a 24-hour family violence information line at 310-1818 to get anonymous help in more than 170 languages, and Alberta's One Line for Sexual Violence is available at 1-866-403-8000, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.