St. Albert currently has 239 active cases of COVID-19, with another 25 cases being diagnosed overnight.
Provincial data released Thursday shows another nine people recovered from the virus, bringing the total up to 430 recoveries. The city has seen 672 people diagnosed with the virus since the pandemic began.
In Sturgeon County, there are 93 active cases with 169 recovered.
Morinville has 33 active cases with 84 recovered.
In the past 24 hours, the province confirmed another 1,082 cases of COVID-19, bringing the provincial total of active cases up to 14,052.
There are currently 383 people in the hospital, including 84 people in intensive care. Ten more people have passed away from the virus, bringing the amount of people who have died so far to 510.
Yesterday, there were 15,900 tests done.
Rapid testing
Around 100,000 COVID-19 rapid testing kits will debut in the province in December.
The COVID-19 testing capacity will allow for the identification and notification of positive cases in less than 20 minutes, which will speed up care and isolation, reducing the risk of further spread.
The tests will be used on patients who are within the first seven days of showing symptoms, allowing health officials to quickly identify positive cases at testing sites, reducing the need for patient samples to be transported to centralized public laboratories for processing.
To ensure the validity of the results, two swabs will be collected from each patient, and all negative tests from both systems will be subject to confirmation by the existing lab-based testing method. This is because a negative result is not as reliable as a PCR test and the test may miss some COVID-positive samples.
Alberta’s health officials will use these pilots to determine how to streamline processes related to patient management, results notifications and digital record-keeping before the tests are deployed widely across the province.
The province is looking at expanding the use of the tests where it can be of the greatest value to the public, such as at homeless shelters and long-term care facilities.
