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Province to determine if new COVID-19 restrictions necessary in weeks ahead: Hinshaw

Alberta’s central zone has 719 active cases
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Alberta’s chief medical officer of health Dr. Deena Hinshaw says it’s possible the province may need to put additional restrictions in place. (File photo by Chris Schwarz/Government of Alberta)

Alberta’s chief medical officer of health says the province is always monitoring data to determine if more restrictions are needed.

“As I’ve said before, we may need to put additional restrictions in place and we will be again looking closely at the data and determining if that’s necessary in the weeks ahead,” Dr. Deena Hinshaw said during a live update Monday afternoon.

On Monday, 545 new COVID-19 cases, including 249 new cases of variants, were identified in Alberta. About 27 per cent of the province’s active cases are variants of concern.

There are now 7,922 active cases of COVID-19 in the province, to go along with the 136,980 recovered cases.

No new COVID-19 deaths were reported Monday and the province’s death toll remained at 1,983.

READ MORE: Alberta pausing AstraZeneca vaccine for people under 55

Hinshaw said one of the biggest challenges the province is facing is that “many people who are feeling perhaps frustrated or tired of restrictions” aren’t following the measures already in place.

“The real question is what kinds of additional measures would be effective to help remind all of us that we are not through this yet and we don’t have enough immunizations offered to our population to be able to reduce the risk of a wave of cases becoming a wave of admissions in acute care,” she said.

The City of Red Deer has 210 active cases of COVID-19, which is up three from Sunday’s report, according to geospatial mapping on the provincial government’s website. On Friday afternoon, Red Deer was at 178 active.

When looking at the mapping for COVID-19 cases on the municipality setting, regions are defined by metropolitan areas, cities, urban service areas, rural areas and towns with approximately 10,000 or more people; smaller regions are incorporated into the corresponding rural area.

With that setting, Red Deer County has 27 active cases, Lacombe County has 48, the City of Lacombe has 37, Sylvan Lake has 33, Mountain View County has 15, Olds has 14, Clearwater County has 10 and Stettler County has seven.

On the mapping’s local geographic area setting, Wetaskiwin County, including Maskwacis, has 64 active cases. Ponoka, including East Ponoka County, has 111 active cases and Rimbey, which includes West Ponoka County and parts of Lacombe County, has nine.

As a whole, Alberta’s Central zone has 719 active cases, while the Calgary zone has 3,726, the Edmonton zone has 1,750, the North zone has 889 and the South zone has 805. The locations of 33 active cases are unknown.

Provincially, 288 people are hospitalized due to COVID-19 – 64 of those individuals have been admitted into an intensive care unit. In the Central zone, 31 people are hospitalized, with four of those individuals in an ICU.



sean.mcintosh@reddeeradvocate.com

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Sean McIntosh

About the Author: Sean McIntosh

Sean joined the Red Deer Advocate team in the summer of 2017. Originally from Ontario, he worked in a small town of 2,000 in Saskatchewan for seven months before coming to Central Alberta.
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