CALL (780) 586-2494

COVID-19

COVID-19 around Pigeon Lake

Coronavirus COVID-19 Disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 Virus

  • Alberta's second COVID Public Health Emergency State of Emergency was declared on November 24, 2020, this has now passed (Feb 22, 2021).

Trusted Official Information As this is an evolving situation, all updates can be found at:

This Webpage Update Log:

Government of Canada resources

What Is Happening? Since its appearance in Wuhan, China in December 2019, the novel coronavirus COVID-19 has spread globally, affecting over hundreds of thousands people so far and has now been classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

COVID-19 can cause serious respiratory illness. Because it is a new virus with no treatment or immunity in people, it is critical for people with any symptoms (cough, fever, shortness of breath, runny nose or sore throat) to stay home and self-isolate to keep it from spreading.

In Alberta, “Given global spread, it is likely that new cases will continue to be detected in our province. While most people who catch this virus have a mild illness, it can be severe or even deadly for our elderly, and those with other medical conditions.” - Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Chief Medical Officer of Health

COVID_SocialDistancing-large

What you can do?

Remember, the fewer people who catch the disease, the better hospitals can help those at risk.
#SlowtheSpread Coronavirus

Hospitalization Graphs

 

Alberta COVID-19 Deaths

 
Flourish logoA Flourish chart
Flourish logoA Flourish chart

What Should I Do If I Think I Have COVID-19?
If you have symptoms such as fever, cough and difficulty breathing and have travelled outside Canada or have been exposed to someone who has COVID-19, stay home and call Health Link 811.
Do NOT go to a physician’s office, a health care facility or a lab without consulting with Health Link 811 first. Call 911 if you are seriously ill and need immediate medical attention and inform them that you may have COVID-19.
self-assessment-button


If you are under quarantine and are running low on supplies, remember you can phone the local store to place & pay for your order and then have a neighbour or friend make the delivery without making any contact with you.
Here are some colour and black'n white versions of posters for your organization windows.

Open for Business
 Prevention Awareness Prevent the Spread (for Facilities)
covid-19-business-c health-covid-19-information-help-prevent-spread-poster-colour covid-19-facility-c
211

 

As Canada Reopens, What Coronavirus (COVID-19) numbers should we be watching?

  1. Are we testing enough, in relation to the scale of the problem?
    1. referred as "test positivity" WHO looks for a number under 10%
    2. Whether a place is testing enough is crucial to whether it can afford to reopen: with such a high-stakes decision, the more we know the better.
    3. Applied to Canada, the graph below seems reassuring, except for Quebec, where test positivity rates have stayed stubbornly above 15 per cent for nearly a month.
    6. HOW IS ALBERTA TESTING FOR COVID-19?

       

       
  2. How fast are COVID-19 confirmed cases doubling?
    1. Given that we know that too fast an increase in cases would overwhelm our ability to cope with them, it’s important to know how fast we are growing.
    2. As you can see, it’s between a week and two weeks for most provinces, other than in Quebec.
    3. Please note that the chart below is a ‘logarithmic chart: the vertical axis expands at an accelerating rate.
  3. What does Canada's Coronavirus Death Data Mean?
    1. End of May the data shows that we’re flattening the most important curve, which is how many Canadians the virus kills.
    2. As you can see, there’s a lot of daily variation in coronavirus death. It can get distracting if you want to understand trends, so it’s probably more helpful to look at the solid line shows a 7-day average.
    3. The line starts flattening in mid-April, about a month after Canada started going into lockdown: this makes sense, since people who die of coronavirus generally die about three or four weeks after infection. So it’s helpful to think about the data as backdated by a month or so.
    4. As we learn more about the coronavirus, we are getting closer to figuring out what the real death rate is: it’s challenging at the moment, because we don’t know how many people truly have the disease. One study estimated it as .37 per cent, which means the ratio may be roughly 300:1 of Canadians have coronavirus for each fatality.
      1. Applied to Canada, that would mean that about 1.2 million Canadians are, or have been, positive for coronavirus, and that testing is catching about 5 per cent of the cases that are actually in the community. For this to be true there would have to be a very large number of asymptomatic Canadians.
  4. What is the speed of transmission? Is the Pandemic getting worse?
    1. Commonly referred to as R0 or “R knot” The math of how it’s calculated is complex, but the concept is very simple: on average, how many other people does someone with coronavirus infect?
    2. We want to see an R number as far below 1 as possible. So that 1 infected person spreads to as few OTHER people as possible.
    3. In mid-March, as Canada started to shut down schools and businesses, the R number was a potentially catastrophic 2.8. That had the potential for an out-of-control pandemic: if one person on average infects 2.8 people, and each of those people infected 2.8 more people, hospitals would quickly have been overwhelmed.
    4. Now, as you can see, the R number is around .8, which means the outbreak is shrinking, though not as quickly as we would like.
  5. How is our Health Care System handling the infection rate?
    1. KEY to all these measures has been to protect our health care system.
    2. Dr. Hinshaw has stated that they continuously use numbers in the hospitals (see below) and ICU/acute care rates along with the number of new confirmed cases (graphs above) as a measure to know whether restrictions will be lifted. These graphs can be found above.
    3. Ultimately the preference is our system has 50% capacity before more restrictions are opened.
    6. Would you like to view hospitalizations in detail for each province? See https://globalnews.ca/news/7464926/coronavirus-canada-hospital-capacity/.

Newsletter Sign-Up

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.