As an Albertan, I know that most people may not be as interested as me in these Coronavirus in Alberta stats, but there are over 4 million of us living, working, and hopefully soon, getting back outdoors here in Alberta.
We have had quite a bit of testing over the last couple of months for Coronavirus in Alberta and I get to watch a daily Coronavirus press conference put on around 3:45 in the afternoon by the premier Jason Kenney and our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Deena Hinshaw. In these press conferences, we get to hear about the number of tests, the number of new cases and recoveries and the number of deaths in the province over the last 24 hours
Once a week or so I like to grind through some of the stats and see how Alberta compares to the US, the rest of Canada, and other countries in our fight against the Coronavirus, also known as Covid-19.
The stats I use come from a couple of places with a lot of accuracy. The first is the line coronavirus update from Worldometer, this gives us up to the minute info on Coronavirus cases in each country in the world. The second place I use is a great page that CTV News has for daily updates for every province in Canada for cases, tests, deaths, and really good daily graphs for Coronavirus.
Today, May 2nd when I look at the stats I can see the following:
And then I can look at the CTV stats that are showing this morning (not waiting for the Alberta update later today). One of the great things that I like to see here is that you can toggle to see the 7 days average for Canada or each province to get a better idea of the trends. But this gives us the number of tests that are being done for each province which is good info, the more you test the more accurate your numbers are going to be.
And I can run some numbers. 🙂 Smile because I like doing nerdy things like this.
Coronavirus in Alberta Tests per Million People
The first one I like to do is the number of tests per million people. Here in Alberta, we have 4.1 million people so with 153,766 Coronavirus tests done so far in Alberta this number is 35,759 tests for million people. When I compare this to our stats at Worldometer I can say that we are at about 150% of the Canada wide stats of 22,050 per million and even higher compared to the 20,355 per million that they have done so far in the US.
We seem to be doing a lot of testing here for Coronavirus in Alberta which is nice to see. This makes it a lot easier to track where the cases are and hopefully catch those big clusters of cases before they get out of control.
Cases per Million People
The next number that I look at is the number of cases per million here in Alberta. So fat we have had 5573 cases identified here and using the same 4.1 million population it means that we have 1359 cases per million people in Alberta. This number is lower than the Canada average of 1472 and about half of the number in the US of 3432 cases per million people.
I am guessing that our fairly strict social distancing and lower population density are quite a help here. There have been a few big clusters of Coronavirus cases here in Alberta though, a couple of meatpacking plants in Alberta account for 42% of the cases and there is some spread up north in an oilpatch work camp.
Some of the stats I have seen in the past, that are probably being revised every day, are that 20% of people that get the disease end up in the hospital and that 2% to 4% of people that get Coronavirus end up dying from the virus. So testing leading to identification makes a huge difference to get people treated quickly.
Coronavirus Deaths per Million People
The last stat is a dismal one and that is the number of people that have died per million people. here in Alberta, a total of 92 people have died which works out to about 22 deaths per million people. We are doing much better than the Canada average of 91 and especially the US average of 199 per million people.
The stats for the number of deaths is messy. I think that there is a bit of inflation in the US as the number of Flu deaths early on may have been swapped into the Coronavirus numbers but I have a lot of experience with the hospital side of the health care system in Alberta and I am sure that our lower number is very strongly influenced by the great hospital care from doctors and nurses in Alberta.
Because of the growth of the Coronavirus all over the world these stats change rapidly. I have been seeing a trend of Canada doing better than other countries and Alberta doing better within Canada over the last few weeks.
What I am really hoping is that over the next few weeks social distancing will really make a difference as people start to get back to life outside of quarantine, there is a big risk is we treat our lives this Summer as we did last Summer but I think that some of the drugs in the pipeline and the lifestyle changes that we have all make will make a big difference to drop the numbers of people getting this virus.
