472 health-care workers in Alberta have tested positive for COVID-19

Hundreds of health-care workers in the province have tested positive for COVID-19 since the pandemic began, with the vast majority of them being in the Calgary area.

There have been 472 cases of health-care workers testing positive for COVID-19. Those include doctors, nurses and people working in continuing care, according to Alberta Health.

Calgary is by far the hardest hit — 72 per cent of the health-care workers infected are in the Calgary zone.

"We've had a number of outbreaks at health-care or continuing care facilities, which likely has exposed a number of front-line staff  to the virus," said Craig Jenne, an infectious disease expert at the University of Calgary.

The province has not yet released a full breakdown of the numbers, but the chief medical officer of health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, says only a small number of the AHS workers counted caught the virus at work.

"So there are many, many more health-care workers who acquired the infection perhaps in the early days on a trip outside of Canada, or more recently they were at a social gathering or had a household contact who was a case of COVID and they've acquired the infection there," she said.
    
The province says well over half the infected health-care workers have recovered and none of them have died.

Of Alberta's 4,696 cases, 3,257 are in the Calgary zone.