Alberta 2020 ICU numbers lowest in 5 years – Justice Centre

By: Greg Staley

Photo by Daan Stevens on Unsplash

The Justice Centre has released information obtained through the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy act that shows that Alberta ICUs were at their lowest capacity in 5 years.

Less than 24 hours ago the Justice Centre posted via Twitter that the centre had heard from “staff at two different Alberta hospitals, one in Calgary and one in Edmonton, stating they are near-empty.”

The Justice Centre released a bombshell shortly after by releasing the FOIP data that showed Alberta’s ICU admissions were at a 5 year low in 2020.

2016 ICU admissions in Alberta – 23,439

2017 ICU admissions in Alberta – 23,648

2018 ICU admissions in Alberta – 23,939

2019 ICU admissions in Alberta – 24,010

2020 ICU admissions in Alberta – 22,409

As Diverge Media has previously reported – over-run hospitals aren’t a new issue in Canada. Hallway medicine unfortunately has become somewhat of a normative situation in Canadian healthcare -except now the narrative has changed to blame Covid. Whereas before we would treat patients in overflow and not make such a big fuss about it (don’t want to draw attention to the problem) now politicians happily point out the problem because they can blame Covid.

Article: *Opinion* Overrun hospitals are not a Covid issue – the problem is not new

This means every time hospitals approach capacity (regularly occurs in Canadian healthcare) politicians get to sound the alarm and blame their populace for the problem at the same time. It’s a perfect scenario – you can never be blamed because Covid is now pointed to as the problem. The question is what did we blame for over a decade before Covid? Poor management of our healthcare by our political class?

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