Alberta's fall COVID-19 surge has arrived and hospitals are feeling it
CBC
Alberta is experiencing yet another COVID-19 upswing, and health experts warn it could get worse before it gets better.
The province's respiratory virus dashboard shows 98 people have died due to the illness since the end of August. For comparison, there's been one flu death.
During the same two-month period, 1,065 Albertans have been hospitalized due to COVID-19 and 54 have ended up in intensive care.
"This is a strong reminder that COVID is still out there and it's still a dangerous infection," said Craig Jenne, a professor in the department of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Calgary.
A total of 297 hospital beds were filled with people sickened by COVID-19 as of Oct. 19. Ten people were in the ICU.
That's more than double the number in hospital two months ago.
"Over the last weeks, we've seen a really fairly sharp uptick in the number of people hospitalized with COVID," said Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Alberta.
According to Saxinger, many patients are coming into hospital directly because of their COVID infection or because the illness has exacerbated another health problem such as a chronic lung condition.
"The majority of patients that we've been seeing coming in are over 65 years old … and many of them have not had recent vaccinations."
Alberta's public-facing hospitalization data tracks patients for whom COVID is deemed a primary or contributing factor.
Typically, there are many more in hospital who have tested positive but are not included in the published numbers because health officials have classified their hospitalization as unrelated to the SARS CoV-2 virus.
Community transmission has been increasingly tough to track due to limited PCR testing and difficulty accessing rapid tests in pharmacies. However, Saxinger said positivity rates (for the PCR tests that are done) have been trending up and that is another indicator of community prevalence.
The latest positivity rate is 13.8 per cent.
"[It's] been running higher for the past month, and so I think there is a fair amount of suggestion that COVID has been increasing over September [and] October. And we're seeing some of it coming into the hospital."
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