BANFF – Banff National Park has gone from the top COVID-19 hotspot in Alberta a month ago to one of the lowest.
The Banff and Lake Louise region now has the 93rd lowest per capita active case count out of 112 regions in the province, dropping to 37 active cases per 100,000 on May 25 from a high of 1,219 on April 25.
As of May 25, Banff had five active cases, down from 164 at the height of this latest wave of the pandemic exactly one month ago, with only a handful of new cases identified in the last two weeks.
“I am thrilled on where we are right now,” said Silvio Adamo, the director of emergency management for the Town of Banff, during a presentation to Banff council on Tuesday (May 25).
“We do want to thank our community for stepping up to flatten our curve, but we must still stay vigilant and do what we can to stay on the current trajectory of dropping cases so we can have a safe and healthy summer.”
Since the pandemic began, Banff and Lake Louise have recorded a total of 801 cases, including 795 recoveries and one death.
Longtime resident Ron Giesbrecht, 43, died due to complications from COVID-19 on April 29.
Alison Gerrits, who is a member of Banff’s emergency coordination centre and the Bow Valley COVID-19 task force, said there have been 35 COVID cases to date in May compared to 265 in April.
She said the drop in weekly COVID cases being diagnosed is particularly encouraging.
“There have been seven cases diagnosed over the last two-week period – six the week of May 9-15 and just one cases diagnosed in the last week May 16-23,” she said.
With Banff and Lake Louise’s case counts declining so substantially, Gerrits said the demand for testing is also dropping off, noting there were 201 tests conducted May 10-16 and 77 last week.
“This represents the lowest number of weekly tests recorded in Banff-ID9 since we started tracking testing numbers back in early December of 2020,” she said.
Councillor Peter Poole thanked the Town of Banff team and the broader community for all the work done to bend the curve in less than a month, calling it a “huge miracle.”
“To go from 164 cased down to five is a sign of the great care that everybody did in trying to work together,” he said.
“We stepped up and did the right thing… now we're starting to have huge vaccination rates that only reinforce the good efforts that we’re all doing.”
Adamo said only one person remains in isolation in the community at the Red Carpet Inn. Banff has 140 isolation rooms available at four locations throughout town.
“We are making plans to revert back to the YWCA when the Red Carpet Inn starts to reinstate to a more hospitality-oriented operation,” Adamo said.
As of May 25, there were 12,078 active COVID-19 cases in the province, including 387 new cases identified in the previous 24 hours. There are 565 people in hospital, which includes 158 people in intensive care.
There are 12 active cases in Canmore and 48 throughout the MD of Bighorn, which includes Harvie Heights, Exshaw, Lac Des Arcs and Stoney Nakoda at Morley.
The Town of Banff implored Albertans to stay away from Banff until the after the May long weekend, but despite this, and the fact that no restaurants are open except for takeout, thousands of people flocked to the townsite.
Traffic counts for the Victoria Day holiday long weekend show there were 11,257 vehicles per day on Friday, 16,285 on Saturday, 13,542 on Sunday and 9,719 on Monday.
By comparison, the 2019 numbers before the pandemic show there were 17,182 on the Friday of the long weekend, 18,605 on Saturday, 25,182 and 21,385 on the Monday.
Adamo said the municipal enforcement branch conducted 36 downtown patrols throughout the holiday weekend and an additional 34 patrols in outlying areas such as the canoe docks, Central Park, the recreation grounds and Bow Falls.
“The officers saw very good mask compliance, with reminders in the downtown core on proper mask wearing,” he said. “No one defied the warning reminders and complied immediately.”
Administration plans to bring back the temporary mandatory mask bylaw for review at council’s next meeting on June 14.
