Supplied: Alberta Government

By Abby Zieverink

covid updates changing

Alberta transitioning to weekly COVID-19 updates

Mar 16, 2022 | 5:05 PM

Alberta’s Health Minister has announced the province will shift daily COVID-19 reporting updates to only once a week starting on Monday next week.

Jason Copping says Alberta will join other provinces such as Saskatchewan in its COVID-19 data and outbreak reporting. This means updates will only be reported by the province every Wednesday.

Daily reporting will continue on March 17 and 18 before making the transition to weekly reporting every Wednesday.

“Data for the previous seven days will be available every Wednesday,” said Copping. “With this shift, we will also consolidate some of the data posted to Alberta.ca to reflect the most relevant, current information.”

“For example, as contact tracing is currently being done only in high-risk settings, we are removing the source of exposure graph that lists most cases as being from an unknown source.”

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Alberta entered step one in its lifting of restrictions on February 8 and rolled into Phase 2 on March 1.

Copping says the decision to shift COVID updates to once a week is because of the continual decline or plateau in both leading and lagging COVID-19 indicators since Alberta moved into the first phase of lifting public health measures.

Copping adds there has been a steady, continual decline in what he calls the most important lagging indicator, hospitalizations.

“Today, hospitalizations are down to 989, including 70 in the ICU, both of those figures are down around 40 per cent from when we started easing measures.”

He mentioned over the last five weeks, the easing of measures has not appeared to cause an uptick in COVID-19 case numbers.

“There’s been some variation in the positivity rate for PCR tests, but overall since Step 1 began it has dropped by seven per cent,” Copping explained.

EverythingGP will continue to report local weekly updates as the become available from Alberta Health. All COVID-19 data can be found on the government’s website.