By Chris Brown

Province keeping close watch over variant COVID strains

Feb 9, 2021 | 8:19 PM

Alberta’s chief medical officer of health says they are closely watching how COVID-19 cases are trending, but there is no specific benchmark on how many variant cases need to be identified for the province’s reopening plan to be paused.

“If we start to see more variants, there is of course a greater risk that our cases may start to rise, but there is no specific variant benchmark because what is most important is we keep our COVID cases trending down which in turn means our hospitalizations and our ICU numbers continue to trend down, as do our COVID deaths,” says Dr. Deena Hinshaw.

One new variant case was identified in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 104. Of those, 97 are the B.1.1.7. variant first identified in the U.K. and seven are the N501Y.V2 variant first found in South Africa.

She admitted it is a “serious worry” of hers that one of these strains becomes the new dominant strain in Alberta. But also said it’s important to keep the new numbers that in context.

She said the first variant case was identified retrospectively in a sample first taken from a returning traveller on Dec. 15. Since then, the 104 variant cases identified comes from more than 43,000 cases of COVID detected in the province.

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She said that accounts for a quarter of a per cent of all the cases identified from Dec. 15 onward.

“Since our lab has begun testing most if not all positive samples, the average per cent of all cases that are variants of concern is higher a 1.4 per cent of all positive tests.”

She said that between Jan. 30 and Feb. 5, 38 variant cases have been found versus 2,703 non-variant cases.

“This does not in any way minimize the threats these variants pose or the impact they will have if we let them spread widely,” Hinshaw said. “However so far variants are still very rare and we are working hard to try to keep it that way.”

Alberta Health has expanded testing capacity, created dedicated variant contact tracing teams and moved rapidly to isolate variant cases and prevent virus spread, Hinshaw said.

She added the public health measures such as staying home when sick, getting tested and following the letter and spirit of the rules in place are even more important, calling them the tried and true methods.

(CHAT News Today)