Calgary hospitals preparing for expected surge of COVID-19 patients

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Calgary’s hospitals are preparing for an expected surge of COVID-19 patients as total cases, variant cases and hospitalizations climb across the province.

After managing two previous waves, one in early 2020 and a second in late fall, Alberta Health Services is continuing to carefully monitor the current situation and is able to quickly adapt to changes in patient demand, AHS said in a statement.

Alberta remains far from the peak of hospitalizations in December, but hospital admissions of COVID-19 patients are gradually increasing.

Total hospitalizations dipped as low as 248 on March 6 before they began to rise. By Wednesday, Alberta hospitals were caring for 285 COVID-19 patients, including 53 in intensive-care units. This was five hospitalizations fewer than the day before.

“It is unclear how significant any increase in patients requiring hospital care will be, but as community cases increase, we anticipate hospitalizations will also increase,” AHS said Wednesday.

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Dr. Daniel Gregson, a professor at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine who specializes in infectious disease and microbiology, said hospitalizations lag up to two weeks behind newly identified cases.

“If we’ve had growth in cases over the past two weeks, it means we’ll have growth in hospitalizations over the next week or two,” Gregson said Tuesday.

Alberta’s active cases topped 6,000 again this week, reaching 6,534 by Wednesday as the province reported another 692 cases of the novel coronavirus. The curve of infections looks eerily similar to what Alberta documented in October at the start of the second wave.

Between Feb. 21 and March 21, Alberta recorded an 80 per cent increase in new daily cases among youth aged five to 19, and a 9.5 per cent decline for those over 70 years old — many of whom have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

About 19 per cent of Alberta’s active cases are variant cases, primarily the B.1.1.7 strain that was first identified in the United Kingdom.

Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, said the accelerating spread of the variants of concern should remind Albertans that we are not through the pandemic yet.

“We do not have enough vaccine on board. The only current tool that we have collectively until we have the time to get enough vaccine on board for our population is each other’s actions to keep our community safe,” Hinshaw said during Wednesday’s news conference.

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AHS isolates COVID-19 patients in private rooms until they are screened for a variant of concern. If they test negative for a variant, they are transferred to a COVID unit with a cohort of patients with the same strain or another private room within the COVID unit. If they have a variant case, they remain isolated in the private room.

None of the COVID units in Calgary have been closed and 15 of the 30 ICU spaces that were made available during the second wave are open. With these spaces, Calgary has room for 81 ICU patients.

Likewise, Edmonton kept two additional ICU spaces open and has room for 74 ICU patients. Alberta reported a peak of 167 COVID-related admissions to ICU at the end of December.

“Our pandemic planning allows us to increase the allocation of hospital and ICU capacity to patients with COVID-19 as demand rises,” said AHS.

There are active outbreaks at 11 acute-care facilities across the province, including outbreaks at Strathmore Hospital in the Calgary zone, Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre in the Central zone and Chinook Regional Hospital in the South zone.

During a live stream on his Facebook account Wednesday night, Premier Jason Kenney said 88 per cent of ICU patients with COVID-19 in Alberta are under the age of 65 and the average age is 58. The average age of COVID hospitalizations is 61.

The average age of hospitalizations due to COVID-19 for Indigenous individuals in Alberta is 40, Kenney said.

“That is why we are vaccinating Indigenous people at younger ages,” the premier said.

sbabych@postmedia.com
Twitter: @BabychStephanie