After a few days of lower numbers, Alberta is reporting 21 COVID fatalities over the past 24 hours.
When it comes to new cases, there were 669 people who tested positive over the past day out of about 14,900 tests for a provincial positivity rate of 4.5 percent. That’s more than a full percentage point lower than the previous day’s rate.
Case numbers in the Lakeland and elsewhere have been updated online.
Alberta’s Official Opposition meanwhile, is calling on the Premier to present a proactive and transparent plan to respond to emerging variants of COVID-19.
Variants identified in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Brazil and the United States are believed to spread faster and more easily than the dominant coronavirus strain.
Alberta has already identified 12 cases of the UK variant and five cases of the South African variant.
NDP Health Critic David Shepherd says Premier Jason Kenney was “too slow to act” during the second wave and needs to be prepared if one or more of the variants begin to spread.
He says “in the fall we saw escalating warning signs and escalating danger for weeks while Jason Kenney refused to act. He can’t be a deer in the headlights again.”
In addition to a publicly-shared strategy on variant response, Shepherd wants to see daily reporting of variant testing and cases and an increase in the rate of genetic sequencing to ten percent of all positive tests.
Written by Tina Karst, My LethbridgeNow.com