WESTLOCK — The Westlock area has not recorded any new cases of COVID-19 since yesterday’s update, and six people have recovered.
There are 19 active cases of 154 recorded since the start of the pandemic. One person has died, a 90-year-old man at the Westlock Continuing Care Centre, and 134 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 yesterday. Immunization was expanded yesterday to include emergency medical technicians and paramedics.
The province has administered 52,318 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.
Yesterday, premier Jason Kenney said the province could run out of vaccines by the end of next week and the capacity to roll out doses will exceed the supply.
In Alberta, 652 new cases were reported today out of 9,300 tests administered, for a positivity rate of 6.8 per cent.
Alberta’s chief medical officer Dr. Deena Hinshaw said AHS is looking into reasons for the low testing numbers but no specific cause has been identified yet. Labs are up to date and there are no backlogs, and testing policies haven’t changed.
One school in the province is on alert with one confirmed case of COVID-19, likely acquired from household transmission. Schools reopened yesterday 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.
There are 13,220 active cases in the province. Thirty-eight more people have died, the highest single-day increase since March 2020. The death toll in Alberta reached 1,345.
Hospitalizations sit at 819, with 132 of them in ICU.
Contact tracing getting better
AHS is now able to reach out to high priority COVID-19 cases within 24 hours to conduct contact tracing, Dr. Hinshaw said. Cases include school-aged children, healthcare and long-term workers.
Others on the priority list: minors, continuing care and other congregate living cases.
The rate of cases with unknown exposure has also been reduced from 80 per cent in mid-December to 47 per cent today. Usually, about 30 per cent of cases have a source of exposure that can’t be identified.
Andreea Resmerita, TownandCountryToday.com
Watch Dr. Hinshaw's COVID-19 update on Jan. 12:
