Alberta Premier Jason Kenney answers questions after announcing $43-million in repairs and improvements to provincial parks at a news conference in Calgary on Sept. 15, 2020. COVID-19 vaccinations in Alberta have officially begun and Premier Jason Kenney says he won’t tolerate queue jumping.
Todd Korol/The Canadian Press
COVID-19 vaccinations in Alberta have officially begun and, as lineups form in the coming days, Premier Jason Kenney says he won’t tolerate queue jumping.
“At our very first cabinet discussion on this I said, ‘We must build an absolute wall around the vaccination program to ensure there’s no political pressure of any kind on who gets vaccinated when,’ ” Mr. Kenney said Tuesday, moments after two health care workers became the first Albertans to receive the vaccine.
“I don’t want [legislature members] from I don’t care what party saying that the nursing home in their constituency or a constituent’s mom needs to go first.
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“We have to have this run impartially, objectively by expert officials. And I have confidence in them.”
Alberta has some recent experience with medical queue jumping.
In 2009, it was discovered that players and families of the Calgary Flames National Hockey League team had somehow managed to jump ahead of others to get doses of the scarce H1N1 vaccine.
In 2013, a provincial inquiry into health care queue-jumping found isolated instances of misbehaviour. It urged more action to reduce surgical wait times, noting that long waits for care were an incentive for insiders to butt ahead in line.
Alberta joins a growing list of provinces that have administered the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Ontario and Quebec started Monday.
The first COVID-19 vaccine injections in Canada were administered in Toronto and Quebec City within half an hour of each other on Monday. Personal support worker Anita Quidangen was the first in Ontario to get the shot.The Globe and Mail
About 3,900 doses arrived in Alberta on Monday night and are to be administered to high-risk front-line health workers in the coming days.
On Tuesday, Sahra Kaahiye, a respiratory therapist at Edmonton’s Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital, and Tanya Harvey, an intensive-care nurse at the Foothills Medical Centre Cell in Calgary, were the first to get their shots.
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Another 25,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine are expected to arrive next week, again to front-line health workers. More doses are to arrive in the months to come.
Alberta already announced a three-phase plan to distribute the vaccine. The first phase, from now until about March, is to focus on 10 per cent of Alberta’s population representing those most at risk – front-line health workers, long-term care residents and the elderly.
The priority group for the second phase, which is to ramp up through the spring and vaccinate a third of the province, has yet to be determined. The final 60 per cent of Albertans are to get their vaccinations starting in the summer.
Who gets priority in the second phase is the responsibility of an interdepartmental team headed up by senior civil servant Paul Wynnyk.
Mr. Kenney said he’s leaving those decisions to Mr. Wynnyk, but expects the next phase of recipients could be those on the front lines who deliver critical, non-medical services, such as those who operate the electricity grid.
“That’s the kind of thing you can’t risk going down,” he said. “[But] we’ll leave that determination to the experts.”
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Alberta has been dealing with the pandemic on multiple fronts. Last week, Mr. Kenney introduced stricter health rules to reduce sharply rising case counts that have registered well over a thousand new cases a day for about a month.
Some businesses from movie theatres to hair salons have closed, while restaurants can only do takeout and retailers are limited to 15-per-cent capacity.
On Tuesday, the province reported 1,341 new COVID cases, with 742 people in hospital and 137 of them in intensive care. There are 20,649 active cases. So far, 744 people have died.
Mr. Kenney said some urban regions have been hit particularly hard by the novel coronavirus, including north Edmonton and northeast Calgary, where families tend to live in high-density housing and may not be able to physically distance properly.
Mr. Kenney announced new supports for those areas, which will include helping residents fill out online applications for aid and free short-term stays in motels.
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HALIFAX – The Nova Scotia government says it could be months before it reveals how many people are on the wait-list for a family doctor.
The head of the province’s health authority told reporters Wednesday that the government won’t release updated data until the 160,000 people who were on the wait-list in June are contacted to verify whether they still need primary care.
Karen Oldfield said Nova Scotia Health is working on validating the primary care wait-list data before posting new numbers, and that work may take a matter of months. The most recent public wait-list figures are from June 1, when 160,234 people, or about 16 per cent of the population, were on it.
“It’s going to take time to make 160,000 calls,” Oldfield said. “We are not talking weeks, we are talking months.”
The interim CEO and president of Nova Scotia Health said people on the list are being asked where they live, whether they still need a family doctor, and to give an update on their health.
A spokesperson with the province’s Health Department says the government and its health authority are “working hard” to turn the wait-list registry into a useful tool, adding that the data will be shared once it is validated.
Nova Scotia’s NDP are calling on Premier Tim Houston to immediately release statistics on how many people are looking for a family doctor. On Tuesday, the NDP introduced a bill that would require the health minister to make the number public every month.
“It is unacceptable for the list to be more than three months out of date,” NDP Leader Claudia Chender said Tuesday.
Chender said releasing this data regularly is vital so Nova Scotians can track the government’s progress on its main 2021 campaign promise: fixing health care.
The number of people in need of a family doctor has more than doubled between the 2021 summer election campaign and June 2024. Since September 2021 about 300 doctors have been added to the provincial health system, the Health Department said.
“We’ll know if Tim Houston is keeping his 2021 election promise to fix health care when Nova Scotians are attached to primary care,” Chender said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – Newfoundland and Labrador‘s chief medical officer is monitoring the rise of whooping cough infections across the province as cases of the highly contagious disease continue to grow across Canada.
Dr. Janice Fitzgerald says that so far this year, the province has recorded 230 confirmed cases of the vaccine-preventable respiratory tract infection, also known as pertussis.
Late last month, Quebec reported more than 11,000 cases during the same time period, while Ontario counted 470 cases, well above the five-year average of 98. In Quebec, the majority of patients are between the ages of 10 and 14.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick has declared a whooping cough outbreak across the province. A total of 141 cases were reported by last month, exceeding the five-year average of 34.
The disease can lead to severe complications among vulnerable populations including infants, who are at the highest risk of suffering from complications like pneumonia and seizures. Symptoms may start with a runny nose, mild fever and cough, then progress to severe coughing accompanied by a distinctive “whooping” sound during inhalation.
“The public, especially pregnant people and those in close contact with infants, are encouraged to be aware of symptoms related to pertussis and to ensure vaccinations are up to date,” Newfoundland and Labrador’s Health Department said in a statement.
Whooping cough can be treated with antibiotics, but vaccination is the most effective way to control the spread of the disease. As a result, the province has expanded immunization efforts this school year. While booster doses are already offered in Grade 9, the vaccine is now being offered to Grade 8 students as well.
Public health officials say whooping cough is a cyclical disease that increases every two to five or six years.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick’s acting chief medical officer of health expects the current case count to get worse before tapering off.
A rise in whooping cough cases has also been reported in the United States and elsewhere. The Pan American Health Organization issued an alert in July encouraging countries to ramp up their surveillance and vaccination coverage.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 10, 2024.
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