Alberta records lowest daily number of COVID-19 cases since March 12

Some COVID-19 visitor restrictions at Alberta hospitals and outpatient clinics will be lifted effective Saturday, chief medical officer of health Dr. Deena Hinshaw said Friday.

During an update on COVID -19, Hinshaw said the decision to ban visitors in April to hospitals was made to protect the safety of patients and health-care workers during the pandemic.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic has evolved, we have continuously monitored the situation and adjusted our measures as necessary. Effective (Saturday) Alberta Health Services will be releasing updated visitation guidelines for all patients in both acute outpatient and in-patient settings,” Hinshaw said.

“These revised guidelines expand the allowance of some visitation while maintaining specific criteria intended to protect patients, residents, volunteers and staff.”

Dr. Mark Joffe, vice-president of Alberta Health Services, said the health authority knows it has been challenging for Albertans who have loved ones in hospital and have not been able to visit them during the pandemic.

“What will be permitted starting (Saturday) is for ambulatory care visits, an individual coming for care to an outpatient clinic can be accompanied by one support individual and for hospitalized in-patients, two designated support individuals can be identified so they may visit at the same time as long as there is space they can visit at the same time.”

Visitors must maintain physical distancing and will be required to have a health assessment to ensure they are healthy and able to visit the hospital. They will also be asked to wear a mask and possibly other personal protective equipment.

The new guidelines will be posted to ahs.ca/visitation and only apply to hospital settings. Restrictions for visitors continues to be in place for continuing care facilities.

Meanwhile, Alberta recorded seven new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, the lowest daily number since March 12, Hinshaw said.

To date, the province has had 7,098 confirmed cases, of which 328 are active while 6,629 have recovered.

No new deaths were recorded Friday, keeping the total at 146. Within the past 24 hours, 6,455 tests were performed — the highest number of tests per day so far. In the Edmonton zone, there have been 574 confirmed cases, of which 57 are still active.

Across Alberta, there are 44 people hospitalized with COVID-19, six of whom are in intensive care units.

The province also announced in a news release Friday that health partners are building a $300,000 biorepository to preserve COVID-19 samples longterm to support medical research in combating the virus. There will be two hubs, one at the University of Alberta and the other at the University of Calgary, where the samples will be stored in sophisticated refrigeration equipment.

“We are thinking about the future and about deeper study of the coronavirus through clinical and academic research,” said Dr. Vernia Yiu, president and CEO of AHS.

There are dozens of Alberta-based researchers who are working on more than 30 research projects that will need the samples of COVID-19 to explore areas like rapid point-of-care testing, drugs, antibody testing and genome sequencing, the release states.

In Canada, there have been 94,070 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 7,652 deaths, the latest numbers from the Government of Canada show. Globally, there have been 6,535,354 confirmed cases and 387,155 deaths, according to the World Health Organization.