WESTLOCK — The Westlock area has recorded one more COVID-19 case since yesterday’s update, and one more person has recovered.
There are 19 active cases of 155 recorded since the start of the pandemic. One person has died, a 90-year-old man at the Westlock Continuing Care Centre, and 135 others have recovered.
The area includes the Town of Westlock, Westlock County and the Village of Clyde.
The outbreak at the Continuing Care Centre is still ongoing.
Long-term care and designated supportive living facilities in the North zone have completed vaccinations for residents and healthcare staff earlier this week. Immunization was expanded Monday to include emergency medical technicians and paramedics.
The province has administered 58,144 doses of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines as of yesterday. Alberta Health Services will be making decisions about Phase 2 vaccinations in the coming weeks, once more details about incoming vaccines are available.
A shipment of Pfizer vaccines has arrived this week, Alberta’s chief medical officer Dr. Deena Hinshaw said, and a second will likely arrive by the end of the week.
The second dose for people who were immunized in Phase 1 will be delivered if they have pre-booked their appointments in the 3–4-week interval or if they live in long-term care or designated supportive living. People who made appointments for their first dose starting yesterday will likely receive their second doses within six weeks.
“I anticipate that we will be able to start providing some vaccine, some of those first doses to people in the next phase before we finish the second doses,” Hinshaw said.
In Alberta, 875 cases were reported today out of 16,000 tests for a 5.3 per cent positivity rate. There are 12,838 active cases in the province. Twenty-three more people have died, which brings the death toll in Alberta to 1,368.
Hospitalizations sit at 820, with 137 of them in ICU.
Hinshaw said her call that “we’re all in this together” is not just a slogan. “It is an irrefutable, biological fact of COVID-19 that we cannot escape or choose to opt out of,” she said, before pointing out that business owners who choose to open despite the current rules in place are jeopardizing the community and the safe reopening of other business owners.
Four schools in the province are on alert, including one on outbreak, with six confirmed case of COVID-19, likely acquired from household transmission. Schools reopened Monday for in-person classes after all students spent the first week since the holiday break learning from home. Grade 7-12 students had been home since Nov. 30, 2020.
Andreea Resmerita, TownandCountryToday.com
Watch Dr. Hinshaw's Jan. 13 COVID-19 update:
