'Nothing is really standard right now': Alberta hospitals still straining under COVID-19, says AHS head

Unprecedented patient demand is continuing to strain Alberta hospitals, says the head of Alberta Health Services.

"Nothing is really standard about this situation right now, including staff ratios and some of the patient care we are providing outside of our ICUs," Dr. Verna Yiu, president and CEO of AHS, said Thursday.

AHS has already more than doubled the baseline capacity for intensive care beds, and is struggling to add more capacity every day. That includes transferring patients between zones on days when ICU admissions in hospitals outnumber available beds, she said.

As of early afternoon, there were 310 people in ICU across the province, including 226 cases of COVID-19, she said. 

"We have never, ever had that number of total patients in ICU before," Yiu said.

Alberta's chief medical officer of health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, said all new ICU admissions were among Albertans who had no protection from immunization.

During the Thursday update, Hinshaw once again pushed Albertans to get vaccinated and provided sobering statistics about the risk of not doing so.