Everything you need to know about COVID-19 in Alberta on Thursday, Dec. 10
Alberta to start rollout of COVID-19 vaccine for acute-care staff next week
The latest:
- As rising COVID-19 cases put pressure on Alberta's health-care system, up to 60 per cent of Edmonton-area surgeries will be delayed and diagnostic imaging and other clinical support services will be reduced by as much as 40 per cent.
- Alberta health-care workers on the front lines will be the first in the province to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
- Starting next week, 3,900 doses will go to ICU doctors and nurses, respiratory therapists and long-term care workers in a bid to keep both the workers and those under their care safe.
- Details on the vaccine and Alberta's plans to date can be found here.
- Albertans learned Tuesday about a raft of sweeping new restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of COVID-19, with most set to begin Sunday and sure to drastically rein in peoples' holiday-season festivities.
- Effective immediately, indoor and outdoor social gatherings are prohibited, Premier Jason Kenney announced. People who live alone are limited to up to two close contacts for in-person visits.
- Masks are now mandatory across the province in all indoor workplace and facilities outside the home. Until now, Alberta had been the only province without a mask mandate.
- Starting Sunday, retail services and malls must reduce customer capacity to 15 per cent of fire code occupancy. Restaurants, pubs and bars are closed to in-person service. Takeout, delivery and curbside pickup are allowed.
- Hair salons, nail salons, casinos, bowling alleys, gyms, movie theatres, libraries and museums will be closed as of Sunday.
- Places of worship are limited to 15 per cent of fire code occupancy.
- Starting Sunday, all employees are required to work from home unless their employer determines they need to be at work in person.
- A full list of the new restrictions is available on the province's website.
- Alberta reported 1,566 new cases on Thursday, for a total of 20,163 active cases. Active cases in the province dropped slightly for the second straight day.
- There are 682 people in hospital, 124 in ICUs.
- The province's R-value, the number of people infected by each infected person, was 1.13 as of last week.
- Alberta will triple its small and medium enterprise grants to $20,000, while lowering the eligibility criteria to 30 per cent of revenues lost retroactive to March.
- Alberta's vaccine news comes after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday morning that several hundred thousand doses of the Pfizer vaccine will be available in Canada before the end of the year — shots primarily earmarked for long-term care home residents and the staffers working there.
- Military reservists are preparing for possible deployment in the Prairies as COVID-19 rates soar.
- An internal Alberta government document, obtained by CBC News, shows the province has been planning for more than a week to set up indoor field hospitals to treat 750 COVID patients.
- As of Thursday, Calgary had more than 7,304 active cases and Edmonton had more than 9,464.
What you need to know today in Alberta
As rising COVID-19 cases put pressure on Alberta's health-care system, the province plans to postpone many surgical procedures in the Edmonton area.
Hinshaw said on Tuesday that up to 60 per cent of non-urgent scheduled surgeries that require a hospital stay will be postponed in the Edmonton zone.
Diagnostic imaging and other clinical support services will be reduced by as much as 40 per cent, and ambulatory visits and procedures by as much as 70 per cent, according to Alberta Health Services.
"These will help ensure there is space to care for the critically ill patients who require care, both now and in the coming weeks," Hinshaw said on Tuesday.
Front-line health-care workers will receive the first 3,900 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine starting Dec. 16. The ICU doctors and nurses, respiratory therapists and long-term care staff will need to visit the vaccine delivery sites in Edmonton and Calgary to receive their first and second doses, which are given approximately one month apart.
"This early distribution is an important step in our continued fight against COVID-19 but we can't take our foot off the gas," Health Minister Tyler Shandro said Tuesday, adding that it will be months before the majority of the population can be immunized.
The news comes after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday morning that up to 249,000 doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine would be available in Canada before the end of the year.
Alberta reported 1,566 new cases on Thursday, for a total of 20,163 active cases. The province has around a 9 per cent positivity rate. Thirteen more people have died, for a total of 666 deaths. There are 682 people in hospital, 124 in ICUs.
On Tuesday, Alberta announced the strictest restrictions of the entire pandemic in an effort to slow the surging COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in the province.
"If you gathered everyone who has been diagnosed with COVID-19 together, it would be the fifth largest city in Alberta," said Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta's chief medical officer of health.
"Every case is a person … we are all at risk of COVID-19, we are all impacted by the toll it is taking on our health system."
Hinshaw said Wednesday it's important to follow the spirit of the restrictions if a situation is unclear, rather than working to find loopholes.
"If you are unsure about what to do, please err on the side of caution and make the safest choice," she said.
Effective immediately, indoor and outdoor social gatherings are prohibited. People who live alone are limited to up to two close contacts for in-person visits. Masks are now mandatory across the province in all indoor workplace and facilities outside the home. Until now, Alberta had been the only province without a mask mandate.
Other restrictions will begin Sunday and remain in place for four weeks — through Christmas and New Year's:
- Retail services and malls must reduce customer capacity to 15 per cent of fire code occupancy. Restaurants, pubs and bars are closed to in-person service. Takeout, delivery and curbside pickup are allowed.
- Hair salons, nail salons, casinos, bowling alleys, gyms, movie theatres, libraries and museums will be closed.
- Places of worship are limited to 15 per cent of fire code occupancy.
- All employees are required to work from home unless their employer determines they need to be at work in person.
- A full list of new measures is available on the province's website.
Hinshaw said the target is not to reach zero COVID-19 cases, something other jurisdictions have aimed for, but to no longer have the health-care system be at risk.
"These are decisions that we have arrived at not as a first resort but as a last resort, to protect lives and to preserve our health-care system," Premier Jason Kenney said.
Kenney said it's with great reluctance Albertans are being asked to limit holiday gatherings to the members of their household, or to two close contacts for people who live by themselves.
"We simply cannot let this Christmas turn into a tragedy for many families," he said.
The rising cases are already impacting health-care availability — in Edmonton, 60 per cent of non-urgent surgeries that require a hospital stay are being postponed.
There were active alerts in 18 per cent of schools in the province as 432 schools have active COVID-19 alerts or outbreaks.
With a large swath of Alberta teachers delivering lessons online, the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA) says teachers are confused about why new COVID-19 measures — including a work-from-home mandate — are not being applied to school staff and teachers when possible.
ATA president, Jason Schilling says under these continuously changing and increasingly stressful months, teachers continue to do all they can to meet the needs of their students.
"But, they feel like there's mixed messages that are being sent by government to work from home where you can and then be told, 'except if you work in school, you need to work in your building,'" he said.
Schilling said teachers — especially those teaching Grade 7 to 12 students who were all moved online last week — feel they've got the ability to work at home, but still are not allowed.
With 18 per cent of the province's schools on COVID alert or outbreak status, Alberta Health Services is changing its classroom isolation requirements so contact tracers will now assess school staff exposures on a case-by-case basis.
Previously, contact tracers said anyone who had been in a classroom with an infectious person was considered a close contact and required to quarantine for 14 days.
Now, teachers or school employees who were within two metres of the infectious person for less than 15 minutes while wearing a mask, and practising good hand hygiene, may not be considered a close contact.
Any students who were in class with an infected person for more than 15 minutes total will still have to quarantine for 14 days.
The ATA's Schilling said the new distinctions may be impractical and impossible for teachers to make, given how much people move around inside schools and classrooms.
Furthermore, with the Alberta government's contact tracers overwhelmed and unable to keep up with all school-related cases, Schilling wonders how they will assess staff members on a case-by-case basis.
"This [policy change] has the whiff of panic to me," said Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Alberta president Rory Gill. "Which is, we're not going to be able to keep these schools open if we abide by the best practise, so we're going to change that practice."
Kenney is defending his government's rollout of the new restrictions, even though some medical experts have been calling for the province to implement such rules for several weeks.
Kenney repeatedly stressed Tuesday how difficult it was for him and his government to impose restrictions they knew would severely damage small businesses.
He also said Alberta's balanced response to the pandemic was among the best in the world.
"The instinct of some to shut everything down from the beginning would be devastating on the livelihoods of countless Albertans," Kenney said.
"Alberta, through most of the past nine months, had lower levels of confirmed cases of hospitalizations and COVID fatalities than the other large Canadian provinces, all of the U.S. states and almost all of the European countries, with generally less stringent restrictions."
Opposition Leader Rachel Notley said the premier should have acted a month ago when doctors had called for a lockdown, to prevent unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations.
"The premier acted like he didn't have a choice. But let's be clear, he had many choices, many opportunities, to act decisively," she said.
"Now, all of us are staring down the barrel of the most restrictive Christmas we could have imagined … instead of getting an appropriate public health response a month ago, what Albertans got was a premier who rejected public health advice, who delivered lectures on comorbidities … who pandered to anti-maskers, jeopardized our health-care resources."
Business owners and employees across Calgary are digesting the impacts of Alberta's widespread new restrictions.
Ernie Tsu, a board member with the Alberta Hospitality Association and owner of Trolley 5 pub, said the measures are a hard hit to restaurants and bars right before the holidays.
"It's going to be very tough for us to have to look at our staff, as we have to lay off coming around the corner here. Christmas is usually the best season for every restaurant and local pub," Tsu said.
Solo Diallo, co-owner of Mumbai Dakar in Edmonton, said he worries whether his restaurant will survive, but still supports the new measures.
"We'll just try to outlast and then we'll see how far we can go," he told CBC's Edmonton AM on Wednesday.
Alberta is expanding its small and medium business relaunch grant, to make up to 15,000 more businesses eligible for funding. Businesses can now receive 15 per cent of pre-pandemic monthly revenues up to a maximum of $15,000.
The program is also lowering its threshold from businesses who experienced 40 per cent revenue loss to 30 per cent revenue loss, retroactive to March.
Additional business supports are available through the federal government.
The Canadian military is preparing for possible deployment of troops in the Prairie provinces, potentially as early as Saturday in Alberta, to assist with their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, CBC News has learned.
All of the army divisions and joint task forces across the country were asked earlier this fall to check how many part-time soldiers would be available for duty so as to have 300 reserve soldiers in each area, a senior defence source said.
Late last week, the military expanded the call in anticipation of troops helping out with vaccine distribution, although no numbers have yet been attached to the new round, the source said.
There has been a special focus on calling up reservists in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba in case there is a call for assistance from those provinces, which now have among the worst COVID-19 infection rates in Canada.
A former president of Alberta Health Services says Australia's strict lockdown shows it's possible to reach zero COVID-19 cases.
Stephen Duckett, is now the health program director for the Australian Grattan Institute, a non-profit think tank, and one of the co-authors of the institute's Go For Zero report — a policy proposal with the goal of driving Australia's active COVID-19 cases to zero.
The proposal, which called for a strict lockdown — "done once and done well" — was one of the road maps for the Australian state of Victoria's response, and it's worked. The state, which includes the city of Melbourne and has a 6.4 million population, hasn't seen a single new COVID case since the end of October, after seeing daily cases in the 700s over the summer.
When the oilpatch was sideswiped by the pandemic and an international oil price war, a warning went out that the industry had been pushed onto "life support" as crude prices and company share values both plummeted.
Ottawa rolled out a variety of funding programs economy wide — and some specifically for the oilpatch — in an attempt to get dollars flowing to the struggling sector and limit the damage.
Now, in the months since the programs have been introduced, there's a clearer picture of where and how the programs are working, with billions of dollars of support finding their way to the industry just as higher crude prices have also brought some stability.
The Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) has been particularly popular.
A snapshot of data analyzed by CBC News shows 23 publicly traded companies identified in the oilfield services sector, as well as drillers, have received more than $140 million, pre-tax, in CEWS funding, between them, including more than $23 million to ClearStream Energy Services and $16 million to Precision Drilling.
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 regional breakdown of active cases reported on Thursday:
- Calgary zone: 7,304, down from 7,490 on Wednesday (22,337 recovered).
- Edmonton zone: 9,464, up from 9,289 (21,770 recovered).
- North zone: 1,247, up from 1,213 (3,683 recovered).
- South zone: 601, down from 633 (3,726 recovered).
- Central zone: 1,480, down from 1,500 (2,590 recovered).
- Unknown: 67, down from 74 (119 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
What you need to know today in Canada:
As of 3:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, Canada's COVID-19 case count stood at 439,780, with 73,066 of those cases considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths based on provincial reports, regional health information and CBC's reporting stood at 13,068.
Health Canada regulators have given the green light to Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine, a key step toward launching the biggest inoculation program in Canada's history.
On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that several hundred thousand doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine will be available in Canada before the end of the year — shots primarily earmarked for long-term care home residents and the staff working there.
Quebec reported 1,728 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday and 37 additional deaths, bringing the provincial death toll to 7,349. Hospitalizations were also on on the rise, with 844 in hospital — including 121 people who were in intensive care units.
Premier François Legault warned on Wednesday that people who don't adhere to public health restrictions will face fines.
In Ontario, health officials reported 1,890 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday and 28 additional deaths, bringing the death toll in that province to 3,836. As in Quebec, hospitalizations were on the rise in Ontario, which on Wednesday reported having 811 people in hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 221 were in intensive care units.
In Atlantic Canada, Nova Scotia reported six new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, while New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador each reported one new case.
There were no new cases reported in Prince Edward Island.
Across the North, there were nine new cases of COVID-19 reported in Nunavut on Wednesday, all of them in Arviat. Health officials said there were 48 active cases in the small community on the western shore of Hudson Bay.
There were no new cases reported in Yukon or the Northwest Territories. But the government of N.W.T. said it has found COVID-19 in wastewater in Yellowknife.
Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Kami Kandola said this means there is likely an undetected case of COVID-19 in the capital. The virus was detected through a wastewater monitoring program, which analyzed samples taken between Nov. 30 and Dec. 2.
As a result, the government asked anyone self-isolating in Yellowknife since Nov. 30 to get a COVID-19 test, even if they don't have symptoms. Essential workers who have been in Yellowknife since Nov. 30 should also get a test.
In British Columbia, health officials reported 619 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday and 16 additional deaths, bringing the provincial death toll to 559. The province reported 338 people were hospitalized with COVID-19, including 75 in intensive care.
Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said Wednesday that the upcoming vaccination rollout will be the "most complex and comprehensive immunization program ever delivered in B.C." Vaccines will save lives and ease the "immense pressure" on the province's health-care system, she said.
In Saskatchewan, health officials reported 302 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday and five additional deaths, bringing the number of deaths linked to COVID-19 in the province to 71.
Manitoba health officials reported 280 new cases of COVID-19 and 18 additional deaths on Wednesday. The province — which has now seen 438 deaths since the pandemic began — reported having 300 patients in hospital with COVID-19, including 38 in intensive care.
Self-assessment and supports:
With winter cold and influenza season approaching, Alberta Health Services will prioritize Albertans for testing who have symptoms, and those groups which are at higher risk of getting or spreading the virus.
General asymptomatic testing is currently unavailable for people with no known exposure to COVID-19.
Those who test positive will be asked to use the online COVID-19 contact tracing tool, so that their close contacts can be notified by text message.
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.