Your weekly COVID-19 update

Every Tuesday, the Maclean's daily newsletter will catch you up on what you need to know about Canada's fight against the coronavirus. Patricia Treble will focus on one story worth watching, and you can get a sneak peek here. You'll also get the same mix of Maclean's stories you expect every day if you scroll down below.

“It’s been more than four months since Alberta recorded its first case of COVID-19,” said Alberta Premier Jason Kenney at the start of the province’s pandemic update press conference on Monday, July 13. “The outbreak peaked in late April, well below our modelling projections and hospitalization capacity, and it has been trending downward ever since. Alberta started lifting health restrictions on May 1 … We started reopening more and sooner than most.” Kenny added that the province did well in containing the virus and did so “under the least restrictive public health orders in Canada.” He attributed that success to high testing rates.

One of the key measures to track how Alberta’s relaunch strategy is faring is the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations, which are down 0.5 per cent in the past two weeks. As well, there are just 10 patients in ICU, down from a peak of 23 in early May. Kenny only briefly mentioned that more people are testing positive for COVID-19, although he said the increase in new cases was “no surprise” as the province keeps reopening more and more of its economy. Kenny noted that the new cases tend to be among younger people.

It was left to Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, to put the bad news of the new cases in context. “The spread of the virus is growing,” she said. In the three days since Friday, the province recorded 230 new cases. Hinshaw added, “There are also more cases of unknown sources now than there were a week ago.”

While Kenney said the outbreak has been “trending downward” since its peak in April, the province’s per capita rate of new cases has actually been going up since early June, when it was averaging four new cases daily per million population, on a seven-day rolling average. That average has been steadily increasing and on Sunday and Monday, Alberta posted seven-day rolling averages of 15.8 and 14.1 new cases per one million population. Those are the highest rates since mid May.

In addition, Alberta now has the highest per capita rate of daily cases of any province in the nation, well above Ontario and Quebec, which used to have the worst numbers. Now, Ontario’s rate is 8.7 new cases per million population while Quebec’s rate is 11.4. Alberta’s new surge of cases is boosting the national average, which is 8.4 per million, as of Monday, July 13, up from 7.6 on the previous Monday.

Although the new case statistics are trending in the wrong direction, they are still nowhere near where Alberta was at the worst of the pandemic, when, on April 27, the province was recording 57.7 new cases each day per million population. Indeed, Premier Kenney reported that there are just three areas of the province on its public health “watch” list, meaning that the number of cases in these areas is above public health thresholds, though they are still open for business.

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