By Chris Brown

Province updates weekly data

New dominant strain of COVID in Alberta

Mar 23, 2022 | 4:25 PM

The province’s top doctor says Alberta has a new dominant strain of COVID, the BA.2 variant.

As well, the province has changed how it reports COVID-19 cases on its dashboard, revealing the changes today at the first of what will be weekly updates going forward.

Chief medical officer of health Dr. Deena Hinshaw says the BA.2 strain is more transmissible but there is no evidence to suggest it will cause more severe disease.

She cautioned that a more transmissible virus can cause a large impact at a population level.

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“Therefore we should expect to see transmission trending upwards in the coming weeks, meaning that those at risk of severe outcomes should revisit their precautionary measures and those who have not yet gotten their booster dose should do so as soon as possible,” she said.

The province is now reporting the seven-day new case rate and the number of new cases in the last seven days for municipalities instead of reporting their active cases. Active cases are also no longer being reported province-wide.

Medicine Hat’s seven-day new case rate per 100,000 people is 102.8 on 70 new cases in the past seven days.

That places the city in the “high” classification for seven-day case rate. There are four classifications – highest, high, medium and low.

With the province limiting testing in the fifth wave and since, these confirmed cases do not accurately reflect the number of cases in the community.

Among all Medicine Hat residents, 78.4 per cent have received one dose of vaccine, 74.8 per cent have received two doses and 34.9 per cent have received three doses.

There are now 956 Albertans in hospital with COVID-19, 56 of which are in ICU, and 4,044 deaths.

Health Minister Jason Copping said hospitalizations are dropping “slowly, but surely.” Still, he added, “COVID-19 remains with us and the health-care system is under significant pressure.”

Alberta’s total cases from the start of the pandemic is 536,166.

There are 1,900 new cases confirmed in the province since th Friday update on 8,317 tests.

Again these are only the confirmed cases and do not accurately reflect the number of cases in the province.

The positivity rate for the period is about 22.8 per cent. Hinshaw said in her Wednesday remarks that positivity rate is the most useful leading metric for tracking the situation at this time.

Alberta has administered 8,565,479 doses of vaccine at the latest update.

In the last seven days, COVID was the primary or a contributing factor in 72.3 per cent of non-ICU hospitalizations and 70 per cent of ICU admissions.

Among current hospitalizations, 31.4 per cent are unvaccinated, 4.3 per cent have had one dose, 30.3 per cent have had two doses and 34 per cent have had three doses.

Among Alberta’s total population, 81 per cent have received at least one dose of vaccine and 76.4 per cent have received two doses 36.2 per cent have received three doses.