St. Albert has dropped one active COVID-19 case, from 54 to 53, on Friday after four more cases were diagnosed overnight and another five people recovered from the virus.
In Sturgeon County, active case increased by three, from 14 to 17 overnight. Morinville has dropped to zero active cases of COVID-19 after sitting at one active case for more than one week.
Across Alberta, another 717 new cases of COVID-19 were recorded Friday, with 325 of them being cases of a variant of concern – the highest amount recorded in a day so far.
The variant now makes up 23.4 per cent of all active cases. So far, the province has seen 2,626 variant cases. There are 7,077 active cases in the province right now.
The province ran 13,300 tests Friday for a positivity rate of 5.4 per cent.
There are currently 284 people in the hospital, with 59 in intensive care. There were another three deaths reported to Alberta Health in the past 24 hours, bringing the total deaths since the pandemic began up to 1,979.
On Friday morning, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said he is concerned with the rising case numbers and is prepared to introduce targeted public health measures if there is an increase that threatened the health care system.
“I hope we don’t have to do that, and really the single most powerful way we could prevent that is vaccines. We need more vaccines yesterday.”
