Case Numbers in Alberta Spike in Spite of Economy Crippling Lockdowns

Although lockdowns have been touted in Canada as the be-all and end-all for preventing the spread of COVID-19, unlike the United States that has seen cases fall as states become more open, Alberta’s case counts keep rising higher despite how locked down the province gets.

Premier Jason Kenney and his public health advisors are now even throwing around the idea of having curfews across the province to prevent people from leaving home past a certain hour of the night.

It seems rather odd that despite the vast majority of Albertans complying with public health measures, whether they would stand up in court or not, somehow cases rise unaffected by the overbearing measures gutting Alberta’s small business community.

Both the Alberta government, including Kenney himself, along with the mainstream media have begun targeting those defying lockdown measures as being responsible for Alberta’s very high per capita cases, despite it being a small minority of Albertans and their public gatherings not being directly tied to large outbreaks.

It seems rather convenient for the Alberta governments failing lockdown plans to be able to all be blamed on small events taking place around the province, especially while again states down south that fully opened back up saw reductions in infections, pointing to a potential correlation between going outside and living a more healthy lifestyle and being less likely to contract the virus. 

Alberta Health Services have also been sounding the alarm about hospital capacity in the province being potentially overwhelmed by the number of cases in Alberta, which raises the question of why field hospitals and temporary isolation sites were not created for those who had COVID and needed medical assistance? 

It seems rather odd that Alberta’s hospitals would be getting overwhelmed when already most Albertans in long-term care homes have been vaccinated (the most vulnerable population) and on the government’s own website they admit to only 648 people being in hospital with COVID-19 and 155 in intensive care, which seems very low to shut down a province of over 4,370,000 people. 

What this seems to all be pointing to is not that Albertans growing tired of lockdowns being the problem, nor people not wearing masks, or attending church services, rather bureaucratic incompetence is turning a manageable issue into a crisis.

In a certain sense, if Alberta is able to sustain the highest per capita active case numbers in both Canada and the United States while only needing to hospitalize 648 people, the province is not doing all that bad, and if the sluggish government officials would do more to create temporary hospital resources and labour rather than complaining about rodeos on Twitter we may become even better off.