Alberta’s chief medical officer of health says "we must do more" to protect seniors during the COVID-19 pandemic as Alberta Health Services took over control of a care facility Friday where nearly half of the residents have tested positive for the novel coronavirus.
Dr. Deena Hinshaw said Friday that Alberta Health Services had taken over day-to-day management of the Manoir du Lac continuing care facility in McLennan, Alta., because the facility didn’t have enough staff to care for the residents there, had inadequate screening measures and inadequate use of personal protective equipment.
“It is not acceptable that elderly Albertans are being put at risk in a place where their health is supposed to be protected," Hinshaw said.
Nearly half of the 63 residents of the Manoir du Lac continuing care facility have tested positive for COVID-19, as well as 11 of the 70 staff who work there. Five residents have died due to COVID-19.
Across Alberta, there have been 239 more cases of COVID-19 since Thursday, bringing the total to 2,397.
There were no new deaths in Alberta in the 24hours before Friday’s update, keeping the total number of deaths due to COVID-19 at 50.
- INTERACTIVE MAP: See the latest COVID-19 statistics across Canada by province/territory on our interactive map
Premier Jason Kenney said low hospitalization rates in the province remain a positive sign.
“We are far from being out of the woods on this and the numbers can change very quickly, however we continue to see far fewer hospitalizations than even the most optimistic scenario described by the AHS modelling," Kenney said Friday.
As the province continues to expand testing — including testing all staff and residents in units of long-term care facilities where there are COVID-19 outbreaks regardless of whether they are showing symptoms and offering increased asymptomatic testing in other identified outbreak sites — Hinshaw said confirmed case numbers are expected to increase.
More troubling, Hinshaw said, is 400 cases of community transmission where public health officials can’t identify the source.
Despite growing calls to reopen the economy to mitigate financial disaster, Kenney warned “letting the virus loose would risk us having to come back with an even more stringent and widespread lockdown that would have an even more devastating impact on our economy.”
Kenney commended the federal government on economic aid aimed at bailing out the oil and gas sector, which has been hit hard by a global price war and decreased demand due to the COVID-19 crisis.
“Companies have had to slow down or pause their operations, leaving too many people out of work,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Friday morning, announcing the federal government would invest $1.7 billion dollars to clean up orphan and inactive wells in Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia.
“Our goal is to create immediate jobs in these provinces while helping companies avoid bankruptcy and supporting our environmental targets,” Trudeau said.
The program is expected to create more than 5,200 jobs in Alberta alone.
"This is a really efficient way of getting good, blue-collar skilled labour back to work," Kenney said, adding the “surge” in reclamation work would “breathe new life into many rural communities."
The federal government also announced up to $750 million to create new proposed emissions reduction fund in oil and gas sector aimed at helping the industry lower methane emissions and expanded business credit programs to help struggling companies, like many in Alberta's oil and gas sector, survive the pandemic.
“These three measures combined are very good news when we so desperately need it," said Kenney. However, he said, “more must be done.”
