Photo courtesy Alberta.ca

By Erika Rolling

Health

Covid-19 restrictions and data reporting changes in Alberta

Jul 20, 2022 | 5:31 PM

Alberta Health Services says visitor restrictions in their acute care, ambulatory care, urgent care, and emergency sites have now been rescinded.

The removal of visitor limitations also includes the number of designated family/support people permitted per patient.

The province announced today that four main areas of Alberta’s Covid-19 data reporting system are changing.

Graphs on the interactive online dashboard for hospitalizations will now show patients in hospital with Covid-19 and for Covid-19.

Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw says they will continue to report the same graphs for in-hospital ICU and non-ICU numbers province-wide.

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“With exactly the same methodology for both new rates and the currently hospitalized, so there still can be comparison over time.”

An addition to the dashboard is a new table showing the total number of outbreaks recorded at supportive living/home living sites, long-term care facilities, and acute care facilities, instead of weekly reporting on the specific sites.

“Sites are often left on (the website) longer than their actual outbreak takes place,” Hinshaw noted the information is only updated once a week.

People will be able to see how many sites are on outbreak at any given time, in different categories as well.

In addition, a new graph will show the number of outbreaks that have happened over time in those same categories.

The healthcare capacity tab is being removed from the dashboard.

“There are other ways of accessing this data with more current detail, that duplicating is not necessary,” adds Hinshaw.

The last change being made is temporary. It is removing the vaccine outcomes tab and moving to a summary of available evidence from peer-reviewed publications on the effectiveness of vaccines overall.

Hinshaw says this is because “since Omicron became the dominant variant, that vaccine outcomes tab has actually been an underestimate of vaccine effectiveness because it is an automatically generated analysis that uses all people who end up in hospital, whether or not their hospitalization is due to Covid-19.”

She said they are taking the information down for a short period of time to gather data more well-suited to show covid-caused hospitalizations and vaccine effectiveness.

No other dashboard metrics are changing at this time.