EDMONTON -- Alberta Health says another 22 cases of COVID-19 were confirmed Wednesday and the Calgary Zone is still leading the province.
Details on the new cases were released from Alberta's chief medical officer of health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw during her daily update. She also added while most are travel-related, the number of community cases is growing.
"Since yesterday we have confirmed 22 new cases of COVID-19. This means that 119 cases have now been identified in our province. We suspect that six of these cases are community transmission."
Community transmission is big concern for health officials, Hinshaw said, but doctors are working to determine where these transmissions are happening.
"Current information indicates the two of these cases are in Calgary. And three, in Edmonton, who do not have obvious sources of their illness. In addition, one case in North Zone seems to have acquired infection while in Edmonton. This is concerning."
COVID-19 tool records 1.3 million visits
Since it opened last week, the online assessment tool for COVID-19 has had over 1.3 million visitors.
Hinshaw says the province is also testing more individuals for symptoms of the illness than any jurisdiction in North America.
"We have performed close to 15,000 tests," she said. "To put that in perspective, that means we have done one test for approximately every 290 Albertans. Our lab is doing amazing things."
Calgary continues to be a hotspot
So far, 86 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed in the Calgary Zone and Hinshaw says that could be attributed to a larger proportion of people who travel internationally but there are other factors too such as clusters of illness.
(Source: Alberta Health)
"There was one particular home meeting where one individual had come from outside the country and several others at that meeting became symptomatic. I want to emphasize that in that particular case, no one did anything wrong."
She says since the situation has been changing so quickly, that particular meeting took place before the province had established measures to order anyone coming back to Canada from an international destination to self-isolate themselves for 14 days.
The province now has full information about the current cases of COVID-19 and where they've been found in each particular health zone.
