Active COVID-19 cases drop below 1,000 as Alberta lifts restrictions

Alberta reported 110 new COVID-19 cases over the past 48 hours as active cases fell below 1,000 on Friday.

The province recorded 67 cases on June 30 and 43 cases on July 1, as Alberta lifted nearly all its remaining public health restrictions.

As of Friday, there were 895 active COVID-19 cases in Alberta, the fewest since mid-July last year.

Alberta Health reported one new COVID-19 death Friday, a woman in her 80s from the Central zone. Alberta saidone previously reported death has been determined post-mortem to not have COVID-19 as a contributing cause and has been removed from the total, which is 2,301.

Hospitalizations dropped by 21 down to 144 on Friday, including 33 patients in intensive care.

Identified cases of the delta variant increased by 53 across the province over the past two days, with the Calgary zone accounting for 43 of those cases. Over the past two days, Alberta labs detected 93 cases of coronavirus variants of concern.

Here is how active cases break down across the province:

• Calgary zone: 470
• North zone: 150
• Edmonton zone: 134
• Central zone: 113
• South zone: 25
• Unknown: 3

Alberta's test positivity rate dropped to 0.69 per cent Friday on 5,492 tests.

Health-care workers administered 1,993 first doses and 28,060 second doses of COVID-19 vaccine Thursday.

Demand for first shots has stagnated over the past two weeks with the province administering 76,344 doses, equivalent to just under three per cent of the eligible population. Just over 73 per cent of Albertans over 12 had one dose and 44.8 per cent are fully vaccinated with two doses.

As of Friday, Alberta had received 1.1 million more doses of vaccine than it had administered.