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“Please continue to follow current health measures in place: wear a mask in all indoor public settings and keep social gatherings to members of the same household,” Hinshaw said.
The 12 deaths reported Sunday follows a record-high 31 on Saturday. A total of 1,284 Albertans have now died of the virus.
The previous high in daily fatalities was 30, first reported on Dec. 17 and matched on Dec. 23 and Jan. 2.
Of the most recent deaths, two were from Calgary and both were linked to the outbreak at AgeCare Skypointe which is grappling with the city’s deadliest outbreak.
Since Christmas Day alone, 255 Albertans have died of the novel coronavirus. It’s the deadliest two-week stretch since the pandemic arrived in the province.
The 811 new cases came from 12,302 tests, making for a positivity rate of 6.6 per cent and bringing the number of active cases in the province to 14,116. This is slightly fewer than the 14,437 active cases on Saturday.
As of Saturday, there was one case of the South Africa variant and four cases of a separate but also more contagious United Kingdom variant in Alberta.
Each case is travel-related and is thought to carry no risk of further transmission, according to Alberta Health.
The emergence of these variants in Alberta was not unexpected, according to Dr. Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba.
“They both appear to be able to transmit much more widely than the current circulating strain does,” Kindrachuk said, adding the increased chance of transmission doesn’t come with increased severity of disease.
“The problem with the wider transmission is, of course, if you have a virus that’s transmitting widely, you’re going to end up with more cases at a faster pace, and as we know with more cases there’s more hospitalizations, there’s more ICU admissions.”
The variants will complicate public-health response in Canada, Kindrachuk predicted, with existing measures in place becoming even more pivotal in reducing spread.
— With files from Alanna Smith and Jason Herring
sbabych@postmedia.com
Twitter: @BabychStephanie
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