Alberta Is Officially Entering Step 2 Of The COVID-19 Reopening Plan But Not As Expected

On Monday, March 1, Premier Jason Kenney announced that the province will be moving into Step 2 of the Alberta reopening plan. 

During the announcement, Kenney said that Step 2 will begin effective today. 

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Health measures will be lifted for indoor fitness activities and for libraries. 

Low-intensity, individual and group fitness activities will now be allowed again indoors. But, high-intensity activities such as running on the treadmill will only be allowed during one-on-one sessions. 

The easing of restrictions for retail, hotels, community halls, and conference centers has been pushed back and is still being assessed as to when they will be able to reopen. 

"Today, we have 257 people in the hospital [...], 48 of whom are in intensive care units," said Kenney. This number is well below the threshold of 450 hospitalizations that Alberta needed to hit to move into Step 2. 

“I know that many Albertans want to us to relax many more health measures today, but we cannot and we must not allow exponential growth to start to take hold, driven by these new more contagious variants as we’ve seen in many countries around the world," said Kenney.

He reminded Albertans that we must avoid indoor social gatherings to keep transmission down.