WESTLOCK — The Westlock area has not recorded any new COVID-19 cases since the Tuesday update, and one person has recovered.
There are 11 active cases of 169 recorded since the start of the pandemic. One person has died, a 90-year-old man at the Westlock Continuing Care Centre, and 157 others have recovered.
The area includes the Town of Westlock, Westlock County and the Village of Clyde.
The outbreak at the Continuing Care Centre has been resolved.
The province has administered 102,524 doses of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines as of yesterday. More than 12,000 people have received both doses. Canada won’t be receiving any new Pfizer vaccines this week while the plant in Belgium is undergoing upgrades.
Confusion over vaccine delivery
Health minister Tyler Shandro said the province is “ready and able to push ahead as fast as the vaccines come but they’re not coming.” He blamed federal procurement for the shortage, and said his office was told earlier today that Alberta will receive 63,000 fewer Pfizer doses for the first quarter of 2021 than was originally planned.
The Moderna doses in stock, Shandro said, are being saved for second doses. Next week, the province will receive a little under 100,000 Pfizer doses and 50,000 Moderna doses.
Pfizer delivers the vaccine in vials that contain multiple shots and the manufacturer is pushing Health Canada to modify the vaccine label from five to six doses per vial. Alberta’s chief medical officer Dr. Deena Hinshaw said Alberta Health Services has concerns about the proposal to amend the label.
Currently, AHS can get six doses out of a vial 50 per cent of the time with special syringes, but there is a global shortage of them. Even with the one milliliter syringe, six doses can be extracted about 75 per cent of the time.
“We are committed to safely and effectively use all vaccines the way they are packaged for use. Whenever a sixth dose can be safely extracted from a vile, our teams are doing so and have done since the start of the immunization program,” Hinshaw said.
The provincial government, is making the case that the federal government procured the vaccines on the basis of six shots per vial, as opposed to five, which would mean Canada will be 500,000 doses short of the four million doses promised for the first quarter. The federal government said that Pfizer will be meeting the commitment regardless of the decision Health Canada will make about the Pfizer label.
COVID stats in the province
In Alberta, 461 new cases were reported today out of 12,300 tests for a positivity rate of 3.9 per cent. There are 8,041 active cases in the province.
Seven more people have died which brings the death toll in Alberta to 1,606. Hospitalizations sit at 591, with 112 of them in ICU.
There are 300 active alerts or outbreaks in schools with 593 cases. None of the schools in the Westlock area have two or more cases.
Nothing like influenza
In 2020-21, no cases of influenza have been recorded in the province despite labs conducting more weekly testing than ever before.
This year, Alberta also saw the highest uptake of the influenza vaccines in a decade, with 1.5 million doses delivered. Dr. Hinshaw said COVID-19 measures stopped influenza this year.
Statistics from previous influenza seasons, however, indicate that COVID-19 is unlike any other virus in the last 10 years, Dr. Hinshaw added.
In less than a year, more than 122,000 cases of COVID-19 have been recorded, compared to 8,470 influenza cases in 2019-20. For the same time periods, 5,300 people were hospitalized due to COVID-19, versus 1,605 for influenza; 850 people have been in ICU for COVID-19 versus 161 for influenza.
The death toll is higher in 10 months of COVID-19 than has been for the last ten years of influenza combined.
Alberta’s chief medical officer Dr. Deena Hinshaw is scheduled to give the next live update Jan. 29.
