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COVID-19 news happens rapidly, we have created this file to keep you up-to-date on all the latest stories and information on the outbreak in and around Edmonton.
Share your COVID-19 stories
As Alberta grapples with a fourth wave of COVID-19 at the start of another school year, we’re looking to hear your stories on this evolving situation.
- Have you or a loved one had a surgery rescheduled or cancelled in recent weeks?
- Are you someone who has decided to get vaccinated after previously being skeptical of the vaccines?
- Have you changed your mind about sending your children back to school in person?
- Have you enrolled your children in a private school due to COVID-19?
- Are you a frontline health-care worker seeing new strains on the health system?
Send us your stories via email at edm-feedback@postmedia.com
7:25 p.m.
Active cases continue to drop in Alberta; 466 new cases
Lauren Boothby
Active case of COVID-19 continue to drop province-wide as the number of people hospitalized for the disease also slowly decline.
By Friday, there were 6,386 active cases in Alberta, down 129 from the day previous. The province reported 466 new cases on Friday. Hospitalizations also continue declining but not as quickly — 660 patients were being treated for COVID-19 in Alberta’s hospitals with 141 in ICU.
Since Oct. 1, active cases have fallen by about 68 per cent, and the number of COVID-19 patients treated in Alberta’s hospitals is nearly 40 per cent lower.
At the height of the fourth wave, active cases soared to 21,194 on Sept. 26. Hospitalizations peaked the next day at 1,132 with 261 in ICU, and these intensive care numbers reached the maximum, 267 patients, on Sept. 28.
12:04 p.m.
Why ‘ideal’ herd immunity for COVID-19 is likely impossible — but attempting to get there still matters
Brian Platt, National Post
Back in the early stages of the pandemic, when vaccines were still just a hopeful idea and variants of concern had yet to make an appearance, herd immunity was all the talk when it came to beating back COVID-19.
Most researchers, looking at the reproduction rate of the original virus strain, figured a community would need to see 60 to 70 per cent of its population immunized (either through vaccination or catching the virus) to starve COVID-19 of new bodies to infect and effectively end the pandemic there.
But that figure seems quaint now. Despite nearly three quarters of Canada’s total population being vaccinated, COVID-19 cases are on the rise again in many provinces, and Alberta and Saskatchewan are only just recovering from massive spikes that seriously threatened their healthcare systems.
Although cases nationally in Canada have dropped over the last month, Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, told reporters on Friday that the latest modelling shows the rate of decline slowing. “It’s not unexpected that we could see some bumps ni the trajectory during the months ahead,” Tam said.
Highly transmissible variants, breakthrough infections and waning vaccination immunity have changed the game substantially. Many modelling experts now believe achieving an optimal level of herd immunity is no longer possible with COVID-19 — or, to be more precise, they believe we need to start talking about herd immunity in a different way.
“There’s this kind of idealized herd immunity that, you know, we get enough people immunized, the virus dies a death and it’s gone,” said Simon Fraser University professor Caroline Colijn, who holds a Canada 150 research chair in mathematics for evolution, infection and public health.
“We’re not going to get that for COVID-19, we won’t get that idealized herd immunity,” Colijn said. Simply put, the vaccines aren’t perfect and the virus keeps mutating to spread more easily.
11:49 a.m.
Children 11 and younger the highest proportion of COVID-19 cases in Canada for first time
Sharon Kirkey, National Post
Canada’s COVID-19 pandemic has become a pandemic of unvaccinated primary school children, yet Health Canada’s review of Pfizer’s vaccine for the under-12s is still “a number of weeks” from completion, federal health officials said Friday.
For the first time, children under 12 years of age make up the highest proportion of confirmed cases nationally. That age group represents more than 20 per cent of daily cases, but just 12 per cent of the Canadian population, Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, said Friday.
It’s not an unexpected or surprising pattern, “given the high level of vaccination in other age groups,” and the fact schools have reopened and that children younger than 12 are so far not eligible for vaccination, Tam said.
Still, it could be jarring to some anxious Canadian parents, especially as they watch pediatric shots being rolled out in the United States.
The sooner Health Canada follows the lead of American health officials and approves Pfizer’s jab for five to 11 year olds, “the better off millions of Canadian kids will be,” Dr. Irfan Dhalla, a general internist and a vice president at Unity Health in Toronto, said on social media this week.
8:00 a.m.
Pfizer says antiviral pill cuts risk of severe COVID-19 by 89 per cent
Reuters
A trial of Pfizer Inc’s experimental antiviral pill for COVID-19 was stopped early after the drug was shown to cut by 89% the chances of hospitalization or death for adults at risk of developing severe disease, the company said on Friday.
The results appear to surpass those seen with Merck & Co Inc’s pill, molnupiravir, which was shown last month to halve the likelihood of dying or being hospitalized for COVID-19 patients also at high risk of serious illness.
Full trial data is not yet available from either company.
Pfizer shares surged 13% to $49.47, while those of Merck fell 6% to $84.69.
Pfizer said it plans to submit interim trial results for its pill, which is given in combination with an older antiviral called ritonavir, to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as part of the emergency use application it opened in October.
The combination treatment, which will have the brand name Paxlovid, consists of three pills given twice daily.
The planned analysis of 1,219 patients in Pfizer’s study looked at hospitalizations or deaths among people diagnosed with mild to moderate COVID-19 with at least one risk factor for developing severe disease, such as obesity or older age.
It found that 0.8% of those given Pfizer’s drug within three days of symptom onset were hospitalized and none had died by 28 days after treatment. That compared with a hospitalization rate of 7% for placebo patients. There were also seven deaths in the placebo group.
Rates were similar for patients treated within five days of symptoms – 1% of the treatment group was hospitalized, compared with 6.7% for the placebo group, which included 10 deaths.
7:54 a.m.
‘Happy dances at the malls’: U.S. border communities eagerly await return of Canadians
Adrian Humphreys, National Post
Vicki Kultgen, the postmaster in Whitlash, Mont., 10 minutes due south of the sleepiest border crossing between Canada and the United States , grew accustomed to Canadians popping across the border to collect mail from a postal box, as it’s closer than any post office in Alberta.
Vicki Kultgen, the postmaster in Whitlash, Mont., 10 minutes due south of the sleepiest border crossing between Canada and the United States , grew accustomed to Canadians popping across the border to collect mail from a postal box, as it’s closer than any post office in Alberta.
Throughout 2019, the year before the pandemic , 1,149 people crossed into tiny Whitlash from tiny Aden, making it the least travelled of all U.S. border crossings. That traffic plummeted to just 238 people in 2020, because of COVID-19 border restrictions, a drop of almost 80 per cent
“I’ve been holding onto packages for them for over a year now that they have ordered and been unable to come and get,” Kultgen said. “We are very much looking forward to the border re-opening because where we’re at, some of our closest neighbours are on the other side of the fence, so to speak.”
Thursday
About 15,000 surgeries cancelled in Alberta’s fourth wave; 516 new cases Thursday
Lauren Boothby
About 15,000 surgeries were cancelled in Alberta’s fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic as surging infections overwhelmed the province’s health-care system late summer into the fall.
Health Minister Jason Copping announced this figure in the legislature Thursday, adding that 30,000 surgeries were cancelled in the three previous waves combined. Copping said the health system had largely caught up on the previous backlog in August when cases surged again.
“It is challenging dealing with COVID. But our system can respond to that,” he said. “It is incredibly unfortunate that we’ve had to cancel more surgeries to be able to deal with the fourth wave, but we are working on a plan not only to be able to get caught up at this point in time, but to be able to show Albertans how we can actually get caught up and then exceed moving forward.”
Copping announced cancer surgeries were no longer being postponed at a news conference on Wednesday.
For weeks , the NDP has been demanding the government tell the public how many surgeries have been cancelled. In a news release Thursday, the NDP said the cancellations were caused by “the government’s failure to act during the onset of the fourth wave.”
NDP health critic David Shepherd, in the release, accused Copping of hiding the number of cancelled surgeries until the last day of the house’s session before the break, criticizing them for avoiding answering their questions.
“It is heartbreaking to think of 15,000 Albertans and their families and the stress they were forced to endure because of this government’s failure to act when it mattered most,” he said in the release.
The NDP has been demanding the government have an all-party committee to “investigate the failure of the UCP government,” reads the release.
