Alberta is experiencing yet another COVID-19 upswing, and health experts warn it could get worse before it gets better.
The province’s respiratory virus dashboard shows 98 people have died due to the illness since the end of August. For comparison, there’s been one flu death.
During the same two-month period, 1,065 Albertans have been hospitalized due to COVID-19 and 54 have ended up in intensive care.
“This is a strong reminder that COVID is still out there and it’s still a dangerous infection,” said Craig Jenne, a professor in the department of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Calgary.
A total of 297 hospital beds were filled with people sickened by COVID-19 as of Oct. 19. Ten people were in the ICU.
That’s more than double the number in hospital two months ago.
“Over the last weeks, we’ve seen a really fairly sharp uptick in the number of people hospitalized with COVID,” said Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Alberta.
According to Saxinger, many patients are coming into hospital directly because of their COVID infection or because the illness has exacerbated another health problem such as a chronic lung condition.
“The majority of patients that we’ve been seeing coming in are over 65 years old … and many of them have not had recent vaccinations.”
Alberta’s public-facing hospitalization data tracks patients for whom COVID is deemed a primary or contributing factor.
Typically, there are many more in hospital who have tested positive but are not included in the published numbers because health officials have classified their hospitalization as unrelated to the SARS CoV-2 virus.
Elevated positivity rates
Community transmission has been increasingly tough to track due to limited PCR testing and difficulty accessing rapid tests in pharmacies. However, Saxinger said positivity rates (for the PCR tests that are done) have been trending up and that is another indicator of community prevalence.
The latest positivity rate is 13.8 per cent.
“[It’s] been running higher for the past month, and so I think there is a fair amount of suggestion that COVID has been increasing over September [and] October. And we’re seeing some of it coming into the hospital.”
While many of those hospitalized have been older Albertans, dozens of kids and teens have also become seriously ill.
Fifty-seven of the hospitalizations over the past two months have been for patients under the age of 19, and a dozen have ended up in the ICU.
“Just because you’re young and healthy doesn’t mean you’re necessarily protected from these viruses, in particular COVID,” said Jenne, who is also the deputy director of the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases.
According to Jenne, the COVID uptick will likely continue given the respiratory virus season hasn’t really set in yet.
“With cold weather coming, with more snow perhaps coming in the coming weeks, we’re going to see more people indoors. That’s more opportunity for viruses to spread. And I think we can anticipate, unfortunately, those numbers going up,” he said.
Meanwhile, Saxinger is worried about the timing.
“This kind of is reading like a fall surge and it is happening kind of in advance of the influenza uptick, which is usually a little bit later and hasn’t really set in that much yet,” she said.
“So I’m hoping that they don’t overlap much because that actually does create a lot of problems on the hospital side.”
Saxinger is urging Albertans to get their updated COVID-19 vaccine along with their flu shot.
“I think people need to be reminded that COVID is still around,” she said, adding Albertans can get both vaccines at the same time.
After concerns about low uptake last year — when the number of Albertans who received a COVID-19 shot dropped to 16.9 per cent — Alberta’s latest vaccination rollout appears to be off to a slow start.
Just 3.4 per cent of all Albertans have had their newly updated COVID-19 vaccine during the first few weeks of this year’s campaign.
“We really do need to see an effort made to get those vaccine numbers up,” said Jenne.