EDMONTON – 652 new cases of Covid-19 in Alberta and, above all, 38 deaths which bring the total number of victims, in the province, from the beginning of the pandemic to 2,901. These are the data from Wednesday, which for the number of deaths represent a negative record: the figure in fact equals that recorded on 12 January for the majority of deaths reported in a single day.

On the other hand, the situation of infections seems to improve, which up to last weekend had been over a thousand a day, but the situation in Alberta is still of total emergency, given that the cases still active (the known ones) are 14,218, divided as follows: Calgary 3,594, Edmonton 3,281, Center 2,908, North 2,845, South 1,578, Unknown Zone 12. Alberta labs conducted 8,620 tests on Tuesday, with a 7.65 percent test positivity rate.

Currently, 1,027 Alberta residents are in hospital, including 236 patients in intensive care units. Of the 791 non-ICU patients, over 73% are unvaccinated or partially vaccinated. In the ICU, 93% of patients are either unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, as Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, said on Twitter (see her tweet graph above). There are 376 ICU beds throughout the Alberta health system at this time. ICU capacity, including 203 rollaway beds, is 75 percent, says Alberta Health Services. Without the extra beds, the capacity would be 164 percent.

Meanwhile, a new emergency is being registered in Alberta: visits and hospitalizations to the Covid-19 emergency room among children are increasing.

Just over 76% of Alberta residents 12 years of age and older received two doses of the vaccine; 85.5 percent of eligible people have at least one dose of the vaccine, according to Wednesday’s update. Of the entire population of Alberta, including children not yet eligible for the vaccine, nearly 65 percent have two vaccinations, while 72.7 percent have their first vaccination.

The other Canadian province in crisis is Saskatchewan, which has had more than 73,000 cases of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic and nearly a fifth of them have occurred in the past 28 days. The province’s death rate last month is more than three times the national death rate and is currently the highest provincial death rate in the country for the fourth wave, with Alberta in second place.

Nearly 340 patients are currently hospitalized in Saskatchewan, 75% of whom are not fully vaccinated. The province has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country.

The current seven-day average for new cases per day in Saskatchewan is 465, or about 38.6 new cases per 100,000 people. Saskatchewan has a population of around 1.17 million, which means that if Ontario had the same infection rate it would have more than 5,600 cases per day, instead of the current average of 476 cases per day.