THREE WEEKS OF COVID-19
More challenges await Alberta
With Thursday marking three weeks since the first case of COVID -19 was detected in Alberta, the province’s top doctor is looking ahead to the “challenging” weeks to come.
Alberta chief medical officer of health Dr. Deena Hinshaw says the past weeks have been a test for the province’s health system but that more difficult times are ahead, as efforts continue to minimize the damage done to Alberta by the novel coronavirus.
“This virus has challenged us all, and so many have risen to that challenge with hope and resilience,” Hinshaw said.
“But I want Albertans to understand there will be challenges coming in the next weeks. We have all seen what has occurred in counties like Italy and Spain. We are doing everything possible to prevent that from happening in Alberta by limiting the number of people who will need hospital care by preventing the spread of this virus.”
Italy and Spain are two of the countries most ravaged by COVID -19, with a combined 12,000 deaths between the two nations. Italy’s health system has faced a critical shortage of hospital beds and life-saving ventilators, forcing doctors to ration care and leave some patients to die.
Alberta Health Services maintains that they will have enough staff and equipment to treat all ill Albertans at the virus’s peak.
“AHS staff and physicians have been working feverishly for a number of weeks now to plan for the space that we’re going to need to care for Albertans,” said AHS vice-president Mark Joffe.
Alberta has about 8,500 hospital beds in the province, with health officials expecting about 2,250 beds will need to be used to treat those with COVID -19. Most of those beds will come from the province’s supply of 8,500, with spaces freed up through the delaying of elective surgical procedures, Joffe said.
The province is also looking to put more beds in now-closed hospital wards and more densely packing beds into existing wings.
Hotel spaces could also be used by AHS as a place for individuals recovering from COVID-19 to self-isolate if their living situation would put others at risk of contracting the virus, but Hinshaw said this would only happen if the province wasn’t able to obtain space internally.
Though Alberta isn’t yet at a point where most of those beds are needed — so far, only 28 Albertans have required hospitalization — Hinshaw says it’s vital that measures are taken to keep the number of people needing treatment as low as possible to avoid a situation of health-care rationing like the one seen in Italy.
“We know that many people who get (COVID-19), those especially who are older and have chronic health conditions, will get very sick and some of them will die,” she said.
“If we don’t take action now, if we wait until we’re in a situation where our hospitals are overwhelmed, it’s too late. We have to take these actions now.”
Hinshaw announced Thursday 67 new cases of COVID-19 in Alberta, bringing the total confirmed cases in the province to 486.
Of the cases, 21 required hospitalization and 10 patients are receiving treatment in intensive-care units.
Hinshaw said the ages of those in ICU vary from those in their 40s to their 80s, with the younger patients having underlying medical conditions.
There are now 14 people who have tested positive at Calgary’s Mckenzie Towne Continuing Care Centre, where a woman in her 80s died after she was infected by the virus earlier this week.
As many as 33 of the 486 total cases are from community transmission — only one more than reported Wednesday.
But those cases are just the “tip of the iceberg,” Hinshaw said.
“There are other people who we have not detected who are out in the community who have spread the disease, and there may be others who are continuing to spread it,” she said.
“We need to be really cautious about these numbers. They are only the portion that we have identified.”
Since Hinshaw announced Alberta’s first case on March 5 — a Calgary-area woman in her 50s who had recently been aboard a cruise ship off the coast of California — the province has confirmed nearly 500 COVID-19 cases, as well as two deaths from the virus.
Over that period, the province rolled out a series of escalating restrictions to public life in a bid to slow the spread of the virus.
One week after the first case, the province banned all public gatherings of more than 250 people, a regulation that soon tightened to gatherings of more than 50 people.
On March 16, Alberta cancelled all in-person K–12 and post-secondary school classes. The following day, with a provincial state of public health emergency in place, Premier Jason Kenney warned that these new restrictions on public life will be a reality not for a matter of weeks, but months.
As of Wednesday, those who flout these restrictions, including orders to self-isolate for two weeks upon return to Alberta from out of country, could face significant fines.
One question that remains, two weeks from the imposition of the initial restrictions on public gatherings, is whether those rules, along with social distancing efforts by Albertans, have been enough to “flatten the curve” and slow the spread of COVID -19 in the province.
Over most of the past week, the number of new cases in Alberta has been between 15 and 20 per cent of the previous day’s total number of cases — a small slowdown from the week before, when the number of confirmed COVID -19 cases was about doubling every two to three days.
Hinshaw has said that it will take about two weeks for the effects of Alberta’s measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus to be reflected in the numbers of confirmed cases in the province.
But she said Thursday that it will be tough to evaluate the effectiveness of these measures given that the virus has come from two sources: returning travellers and community transmission.
Given that most confirmed cases have come from those returning from out of country, Hinshaw said it’s unlikely we’ll see the rates of new cases drop yet, since those cases are less affected by the mass gatherings ban.
The province’s skill at limiting community transmission will be the biggest sign going forward, she said.
“We’re actually hoping that we will see an overall continuation of flatting of the curve and we won’t see a significant spike,” Hinshaw said.
“But we’ve taken many different steps, so every additional step is going to be layered on in terms of impact.”