126 new cases of COVID-19 have been identified in Alberta, for a new total of 1,996.  At last count, there were 107 cases in the North zone.

Due to a data centre outage which caused a technical issue with the province's reporting application, the latest numbers are preliminary and don't include updates to specific zone cases.

Of the total cases for Alberta, 914 have recovered and there have been no additional deaths reported, so that number remains at 48. To date, 85,502 COVID-19 tests have been completed in Alberta.

"As expected, we have seen an increase in testing numbers as we have expanded testing to all Albertans," says Dr. Deena Hinshaw. "Those who are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 who live anywhere in the province can be tested by going to the Alberta Health Services online assessment tool."

Premier Jason Kenney says the most encouraging news in Alberta continues to be the relatively low rate of hospitalization and ICU admissions.

"44 Albertans are being treated for COVID illness in hospitals and 10 in intensive care units," says Kenney. "Those numbers have been stable for several days, in fact the ICU number is down slightly, and they continue to be well below the numbers projected in AHS' modelling that we presented a week ago."

Hinshaw says stable hospitalization numbers is good, but they would like to see the numbers decreasing and are looking at hospitalization trends.

"What we need to do is look at not just those total hospitalized on a day to day basis, but what the new hospitalizations are and what that trend tells us about transmission in the two to three weeks prior to that point," says Hinshaw.