Five years later, COVID-19 continues to leave its mark on Albertans

Five years after the province identified its first COVID-19 case, Albertans are being urged not to lose sight of those still struggling with its devastating impacts.

In a moment few Albertans will forget, Dr. Deena Hinshaw — Alberta's then chief medical officer of health — took to the podium on March 5, 2020, to announce that a woman in her 50s had tested positive after returning from a cruise. 

It was the province's first presumptive COVID-19 case.

Since then, 6,691 Albertans have died due to the illness. And while deaths and hospitalizations have dropped significantly, COVID-19 continues to kill hundreds of Albertans every year.

"This is not a disease that has come and gone. It's unfortunately something that's left its mark on Alberta," said Craig Jenne, professor in the department of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Calgary. 

"The pandemic has ended but, unfortunately, the endemic stage has now begun. And this is a virus that we're going to have to deal with basically every year moving forward."

And while many expected SARS-CoV-2 would eventually become a seasonal virus, similar to influenza, that hasn't truly happened.

"It's not like the flu," said Sarah Otto, a professor at the University of British Columbia who specializes in mathematical modelling.

"It's so transmissible and so easy to get that people are getting it … multiple times a year."

Otto, an evolutionary biologist, is one of several Canadian scientists tracking COVID-19 variants.

"We're not seeing it go away in the summer. It goes through these little undulations as new variants evolve and we see a little uptick. But then people's immunity builds and it goes down again. And that's happening year after year."

Prior to the pandemic, the leading cause of death due to infectious diseases in Canada was influenza, according to Jenne.

That has changed.

"Last year alone, COVID killed more than four times as many Albertans as flu," said Jenne, who is also the deputy director of the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases.