BANFF – With more than half of Banff’s active COVID-19 cases now variants, including the virus from Brazil, a Bow Valley-wide task force has been set up to tackle the pandemic.
In addition, Banff RCMP have issued nine new public health violations, with more charges pending, following an after-hours staff gathering at a local bar. The name of the business has not been disclosed.
As of Tuesday (April 13), the Banff and Lake Louise area had 95 active cases compared to five exactly two weeks earlier. Banff now has the third highest per capita rate in Alberta.
Silvio Adamo, the Town of Banff’s director of emergency management, said Alberta Health has reported the majority of cases in this region are variants of concern.
“Unfortunately, that does include the P1 variant, originally identified in Brazil, with the dominant strain being the B117 variant, originally identified in the U.K.,” he said.
As a result of surging COVID-19 cases in the Bow Valley and detection of variants of concern, the Bow Valley outbreak joint task force was created at the direction of Alberta Health Services last week.
The task force is coordinated by the Calgary zone’s emergency operations centre, and is being overseen by medical health officers in this region, who are reporting directly to Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health.
“The goal of the task force is to implement a contain-and-control approach in the Bow Valley in order to slow transmission of COVID as much as possible,” said Alison Gerrits, a member of the Town of Banff’s emergency coordination centre.
“The group is meeting regularly and its objectives over the past weekend in particular included the mass testing that occurred at Lake Louise and Sunshine ski hills, as well as a pop-up testing site at the hospital.”
The task force is made up of 23 members, most of which are from Alberta Health Services. The group also includes representatives from Parks Canada, Bow Valley Primary Care Network, Banff Mineral Springs Hospital, and the municipalities of Banff and Canmore and Lake Louise townsite.
As of April 12, there were 25 people in isolation facilities in Banff, including 17 at the municipally-run facility at The Banff Centre and eight at the Banff YWCA.
Adamo said the Town of Banff continues to advocate to the province for more isolation spaces.
He said an applicant that successfully made its way through the provincial approval process for an isolation facility withdrew at the last minute on April 6.
“We then immediately began recruiting for another facility, and can share that another local hotel is currently engaged in the application process,” Adamo said.
“We hope that this site can be approved and up and running in short time.”
Mayor Karen Sorensen expressed concern about the rising case count.
“It’s really hard to hear, even though we’ve been watching it day-by-day,” she during council’s meeting on April 12.
Councillor Poole was also worried.
He said Banff’s current positivity rate is 750 per 100,000 people, which is more than double that of Alberta and about four times the national rate in Canada.
“We’ve got to bend the curve,” he said.
Testing is now available Monday through Friday at the health unit for at least the next three weeks.
Adamo said AHS also contracted a private testing company to conduct mass testing for Lake Louise and Sunshine ski hill staff.
“That started last week and will continue into this week,” he said.
Approximately 25,000 rapid test kits, approved by the province, have been or are about to be delivered to some of the larger employers in the community, including the Town of Banff.
“I can report that our fire department has been conducting our rapid testing for the last two weeks,” Adamo said.
“We continue to encourage other commercial operators to submit an application to Alberta Health for the rapid test program.”
As of April 13, there were 15,087 COVID-19 active cases province-wide. There were 402 people in hospital, including 88 in intensive care units. The death toll since the start of the pandemic reached 2,021.
The latest information available from the province indicates that 970,272 does of the vaccines have been administered as of April 12.
